BRADLEY COOPER is Balls, the best friend of successful investment banker, Alex Novak (Will Arnett) and basketball Olympian Tess Novak (Laura Dern). Balls is a permanently stoned and waster, actor who we meet following a prat-fall during an uncomfortable dinner party. Despite only being a secondary character we'll get to spend far too much time with Balls, as he returns at intervals for updates on his utterly parasitic-like life, which his so-called friends seem to accept without any comment, and his marriage to Christine (Andra Day), which is used as a flimsy barometer to the Novak's own failing marriage.
You see, after 20 years of marriage and six further years spent in their relationship, resulting in two children, the Novaks have decided to call it quits, utterly amicably of course. There aren't any exterior forces at play, it's just that they've drifted apart and just don't love each other anymore. Not that you'd know it. They obviously don't have any passion for each other, and that seems enough to call it a day. Anyway, because Alex is a successful investment wanker he's got enough money to move from the suburbs into a flat in New York city just round the corner from an Open Mic bar where he staggers into one night and discovers the audience of hipsters and Millennials just love his utterly humourless observations on his tedious life, and thus is born his new career as a stand up comic.
Night after night, he stumbles into the bar and regales his audience of vapid dudes and dudettes with yet more staggering middling anecdotes of his crumbling marriage and in doing so discovers a second family of jobbing stand-up comics, who treat him like the second coming. Meanwhile his split life jogs on without issue, his wife decides to return to the world of basketball, this time coachin, and their two children shuttle back and forth between their two parents. Finally, Tess and a prospective boyfriend end up at the bar on open mic night and witness Alex's staggering dull set about his break up with her and the stage is set for more hilarity and japes.
It's a sort of boy leaves girl, brags about girl to strangers, gets girl back, loses girl, then sort of gets her back.
And then mercifully it ends.
If you love looking at the pores of people or staring deeply up their nostrils then this is most certainly the film for you. Old Bradley doesn't just go in for the close up, he's literally boring right into the faces of his cast, I swear to god there were a couple of occasions where the camera bumped into his actors. But beyond that there's just this horrible sense of overwhelming smugness about this whole sorry affair, rich Americans indulging their dreams in huge houses with no worries or cares.
I was surprised to discover this was based on the life of John Bishop, I mean surprised as in it gave me a whole new reason not to like him, I can't stand him as a stand up and this self preening 'look at me' bio pic is just the fucking limit.
I hated these characters, they are all scum, but most of all I hated Bradley Coopers Balls (you have no idea how much I liked writing that, indeed how apt) He has such a smugness about him and his Balls is such an odious character and so jarring, shoehorned into his own film, because a simple Hitchcock cameo isn't enough for old Braders, oh no, he's wants his own role crammed into the film to break up the sheer monotony of the whole goddam self-serving, self-important, pretentious bollocks. Arnett is a good comedian but this film seems to hog-tie him, he's best when he's being ott and seeing him here meek and almost pathetic makes his Alex an unlikeable lead, not the same for Laura Dern, who seems to be having a bit of a career resurgence of late, and about bloody time! A damn fine actress, her character is by far the most interesting and entertaining.
But as for the film, it's boring, up it's own arse. And about as funny as an actual divorce.
6/10
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