Rating:

I don’t know. Maybe it’s the small town atmosphere. Maybe it’s the themes of returning to one’s old stomping grounds and rediscovering your old life, right there where you left it. Maybe it’s just Ryan Reynolds before he started taking himself too seriously. But this movie makes me laugh.

There’s nothing particularly unique or special about Just Friends. It’s not nearly as heartwarming as the best (and worst) of Christmas movies, and it’s not funny in a fresh or original way. But it’s got something most holiday films don’t: even-handedness.

For whatever reason, Christmas brings out the absurd in movies. So many films involve a man who wants his Christmas decorations to be seen from outer space (Deck the Halls), or seventeen couples who miraculously find romance in the most clichéd of fashions (Love, Actually), that a simple film about old friends and old flames is actually pretty hard to come by.

Perhaps because of this, Just Friends succeeds as a run-of-the-mill romantic comedy where it might have failed if it lacked all the snow and twinkle lights.

Our story concerns a hot-shot record producer named Chris Brander (Reynolds), who’s had nothing better to do for the past ten years than earn millions of dollars and make sweet love to an overflowing crop of 20-year-old supermodels. But Chris has a secret. Living in L.A., he hasn’t been back to his sleepy hometown for the whole of those ten years.

And why not? Because back in high school he was awkward and unattractive, with few friends and numerous embarrassments—not the least of which was a botched graduation-night profession of love to his best friend, who never dreamed of becoming more than that: Just Friends.

So Chris doesn’t think he’s got anything to return home for. Certainly not the memories.

But, in a simple twist of fate, his plane must make an emergency landing en route to Paris—landing him in the very state he grew up in! So he takes the opportunity to visit home, and thus our journey of rediscovery begins.

Initially hoping just to say hi to Mom and Brother (Airplane’s Julie Haggerty and Chris Marquette, respectively) and then hop on the next flight out of town, Chris instead decides to escape to the local pub after his family helps him to remember just how unbearably kitschy his formative home is.

But only more hometown flavor awaits him there, as he relishes in the fact that the “coolest” football dude from high school is now a hopeless loser, and his old best friends are hanging out in yuletide merriment.

In this moment, Chris realizes what he’s actually been avoiding for the past decade—namely, people who truly care about him, regardless of how he looks or what kind of money he makes.

And it only gets worse from there, as the very bartender of this pub is his old love interest, Jamie Palamino (Amy Smart).

Well, you probably get where it’s going from here. He tries to use his slick rich-guy wiles to land the girl he never could in high school, but all she notices about him is how much he’s changed from the guy she cared so much about years ago.

Meanwhile, some other guy from high school is trying to score with Jamie too. Only he doesn’t flaunt his Porsche and his gold records. He’s a slimy sucker, that’s for sure, but he’s useful as a counterpoint to Chris’ unsuccessful attempts to show off his big-shotness. The other guy has much more success by just acting like a normal human being—of course, the irony is, it’s all lies and deceit, when Chris is earnestly trying to fall in love again.

So anyway that’s about it. We all know they fall in love in the end and blah blah blah, but it’s the repeating theme of returning to one’s roots, and appreciating that which you may initially forsake, which truly make this film worth seeing.

Maybe not more than once, but hey, they can’t all be Jurassic Park.

***BONUS FACTOID***
Just Friends was released in Germany under the title “Just Friends—No Sex.”

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