The Case for Train Spotting

Amy Schumer is an amazing comedic talent.  Trainwreck may not be the greatest film, as it is overlong and rather predictable and has some wild shifts in tone and a not altogether coherent plot, but it does have some amazing performances and featuring strongly amongst them is Amy herself.

Top performance awards however go to a surprisingly tanned and shallow Tilda Swinton (it takes an age to realise who the horrible boss actually is), normally pro wrestler John Cena a hulking, borderline personality disorder cross fit boyfriend, and basketball legend LeBron James who is actually incredibly funny as John Heder’s star patient.

As the leads, Schumer (as Amy) and Heder (as Aaron Conners) are winning enough and make a lovely couple.  They have the comic timing and rubber faces to make funny things hilarious, though they are lumbered with quite a bit of more mundane material, which adds a bit of realism to the movie in that not everything can be a joke or hilarious, but also slows things down tremendously and saps the movie of a bit of its energy as well as its momentum.

There is a whole subplot outside of Amy’s love life dealing with her father’s relationship with his daughters and them moving him into an old person’s facility.  There are occasional bouts of humour in this premise, and the actors involved in each scene are independently brilliant (Bree Larson playing Amy’s sister is awesome, but then I am biased since I saw District 13 from ages ago), but they have very little to do with the “trainwreck” of Amy’s love life and as such seem to be a bit of filler.  Sure, the story gives Amy’s character a bit of depth and provides motivation for some of her wild behaviour, but it seems overlong for what could be accomplished in just a few lines of dialogue or in an amusing montage flashback.

That said, there are moments that are just insanely funny.  Describing them here would be to ruin the jokes (and I am pretty bad at recounting them anyway), so I won’t do that.  But still, those moments make the film totally worthwhile, and if it hadn’t been for the “flab”, the film would have been totally amazing.

Verdict: Trainwreck is not a disaster at all, and actually gets you to the end in one piece and in very good condition.  However, the trip is delayed somewhat by some slow scenes and attempts at depth, which are actually unnecessary detours when all I really wanted was a high speed trip to the finish.  Hopefully I kept that metaphor together!  7 cheerleaders out of 10.