Last weekend, I stumbled across a movie that looked like it might be fun because it was a spoof of romantic comedies, They Came Together. It’s basically giving romcoms the Airplane! treatment, and it was full of cast members I like, like Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler, Ed Helms and a bunch of other people you might recognize from NBC sitcoms like The Office, Parks and Recreation and The Good Place, plus some Saturday Night Live. I was curious to see what they did with this, since my whole Enchanted, Inc. series started as kind of spoofing chick lit/romcoms by adding magic, and then I did a more intense romcom spoof in book 7 of the series, Kiss and Spell, in which the characters were stuck in a magical romcom world in which they had to play out all the tropes.

The movie mostly mashes up You’ve Got Mail and When Harry Met Sally, with some Hallmark movie tropes thrown in and maybe some other things that I didn’t recognize. The gist of it is that a couple having dinner with friends tells the story of how they got together, saying that it’s just like one of those romantic comedy movies, and then we see the story play out — and it’s exactly like a romcom. She runs a cute little candy shop and he works for the big candy company that’s going to put her out of business. They hated each other when they first met but then when they run into each other in a bookstore they become friends, etc. Basically, all the romcom tropes play out.

I’m not entirely sure this movie works. I think part of the problem is that it doesn’t really interrogate the things it’s poking fun at, which means that it leaves a lot of potential on the table. For instance, there’s a sign at her candy store that all proceeds go to charity, and the only time we see her with a customer, she tells the customer the candy is free. So when she learns about the big corporation opening a candy superstore across the street and she visits her accountant to see how likely her business is to survive, I was expecting her accountant to look at her books and then point out that she might do better if she actually sold things and made a profit. I suspect that was more a dig at the Hallmark movies, where they never seem to actually sell anything in their bakeries/candy stores, rather than You’ve Got Mail, where we saw her ring up huge purchases, and I always want to point this out when the Hallmark heroines worry about getting driven out of business. Like, “Have you considered something wacky like charging for what you’re selling?”

It also doesn’t help that the movie doesn’t seem to be sure whether it’s going over the top with silliness or if it’s trying to be the spoof that’s still a good example of the thing it’s spoofing. I find spoofs work better if they’re still actually a good story under the silliness. For instance, Blazing Saddles has a decent underlying story even without all the wacky anachronisms and broad humor. You could make a serious western with that story of a black man sent to be sheriff of a racist town. The main characters are three-dimensional and interesting. In this movie, Paul Rudd mostly plays it straight, like he’s the leading man in a real romantic comedy. There’s even a scene that’s spoofing a typical emotional scene from this kind of movie in which he actually brought tears to my eyes. But Amy Poehler acts like she’s doing a Saturday Night Live sketch, playing basically a cartoon character who’s constantly winking at the audience. It’s like they’re in different movies even when they’re in scenes together. That makes it fail my romcom test of “do I want these characters to end up together?”

And while I’m nitpicking, it’s interesting that they’re genre savvy enough to say that their courtship was right out of a romcom, but during their courtship they don’t clue in to any of the things that are right out of a romcom.

There are a couple of things done late in the movie that are way over the top in a way that’s more uncomfortable than funny and seem entirely unnecessary, especially since these things don’t really go anywhere and pretty much ruin both main characters

I saw this one streaming on Peacock, and it’s amusing enough, but it gets pretty raunchy, so I wouldn’t recommend it as a first-date movie or something to watch with your parents. Now I need to watch Isn’t It Romantic, which is apparently also a romcom spoof. And I’ve found myself pondering how I’d do a romcom sendup, other than what I’ve already done.