Jexi Review
Phil has a major dependency issue — he's addicted to his phone. He has no friends, he has a job writing pop culture 'Top 10' lists, and his love life is non-existent. But his Facebook status is about to change. When he is forced to upgrade his phone, the latest model comes with an unexpected feature... Jexi – an A.I. life coach, virtual assistant, and cheerleader. With her help, Phil begins to get a real life. But as he becomes less dependent on his phone, Jexi's artificial intelligence morphs into a tech nightmare determined to keep Phil all to herself, even if it means ruining his chances of finding success.
R: For strong/crude sexual content and language throughout, some drug use and graphic nudity
Production Companies: CBS Films, Entertainment One
Distributor: CBS Films, Lionsgate
Runtime: 1 Hour and 24 Minutes
Writers/Directors: Jon Lucas, Scott Moore
Cast: Adam DeVine, Alexandra Shipp, Michael Peña, Rose Byrne, Justin Hartley, Ron Funches, Charlyne Yi, Wanda Sykes
Release Date: October 11, 2019
Oh, CBS Films. It was nice knowing you given the brief existence you had. The film production/distribution company, which lasted for at least 9 years, had so many notable titles in its database, such as The Woman in Black, Inside Llewyn Davis, The DUFF (that's personal, okay), Hell or High Water, and… yeah. With iconic, unforgettable movies like those, you would think they'd go out with a bang. They had a hell of a financially successful 2019 with their final releases, Five Feet Apart and Scary Stories, which were low budget flicks that garnered over $80 million at the box office. Now, they've dropped their final release, their swan song to leave on a high note: Jexi, a 2019 comedy from the writers who brought you The Hangover, whose screenplay talents are stuck in the fucking 2000s. This shit feels like it came into existence a month ago without notice and crept up on me like a mosquito bite, and boy did this dumpster fire of a comedy bite me hard.
If there is anything I actually thought was good for this movie it was the first minute and a half as we’re introduced to Phil, a man who grew up with nothing but cellular devices to keep him occupied throughout his entire upbringing. From his first Nokia phone and playing “Snake” as a kid to becoming a social media addict as an adult in 2019 San Francisco, he is inept to the world in a society where everyone is always on their phone as the OneRepublic song “Connection” (a song I personally love) plays in the background. That’s the first three minutes where it nicely establishes this character and his digitized lifestyle. And then… well, the movie began and it immediately reminded me that this is a Moore and Lucas movie. An obnoxious Michael Peña comes onscreen as the boss of this Buzzfeed-like company while yelling at his writing staff, including DeVine’s Phil, with vulgarity while making dated references to old memes like Shia LaBeouf’s “Do It” and the backpack kid dance within the same minute. Subtlety can only go so far.
Whenever Wanda Sykes was onscreen she actually managed to make me laugh out loud, for her brief moments as a phone specialist exist to just insults users for even having one. She has a scene where she compares Phil to a “crackhead” for being too addicted to his phone, which was actually pretty funny. Wanda Sykes might be the only comedic actress who can alleviate a turd solely with her presence. She’s just naturally funny as hell. Wanda Sykes can be in anything terrible and shine the most. She did it with the forgettable Amy Schumer/Goldie Hawn comedy Snatched and she does it in Jexi. On a personal note, it was also nice to see Charlene Yi in big-screen movie and hearing her curse. She’s most known as the voice of the gem Ruby on Steven Universe, which is one of my personal favorite series, so imagining Ruby say “fuck” ever so often is pleasant to me.
You have this schmuck named Phil who lives his life on his phone 24/7, 365 days a year. Even though he has a stable job working at a Buzzfeed-equivalent site developing “Top 10” lists all day, he's lonely and dreams of being a “real journalist” one day with his own large cubicle and wearing formal clothing (because that's what journalists wear, I guess). He’s the shallow kind of lonely where he rejects his coworkers who clearly want to hang out with him and would rather spend his time on his phone. He's unlovable, shallow, thinks his universe belongs online, caters to his followers, and still uses Facebook in 2019 (because who really uses that today?). He crashes into a beautiful bike store owner named Cate whose bike he knocks over but is more concerned with his phone getting a dent than the woman (because he’s clearly an incel). Luckily, karma kicks in and his phone breaks, leading him to get a replacement. He ends up with a defective A.I. system built into his phone named Jexi, who is mean, obscene, has a mind of its own, and might be the ticket to Phil getting a better life and opening his eyes to the world around him… for better or worse.
Okay, my positivity ran out. Hollywood, I don’t want to see Jon Lucas or Scott Moore set foot on a movie set ever again. You would assume that Joker would’ve been the Hangover-related release of the year geared towards incels, but nah. That title belongs to this derivative, unfunny, lifeless, one-note joke of a comedy that wants to make a Black Mirror-type of social statement on technology, a concept that has been done before with a shorter runtime (Cc: Big Bang Theory/The Boondocks). It comes across as obnoxious and lazy, for it’s written by two Post-Boomers whose talents in the comedy genre predate the first-ever smartphone and they clearly have no concept of how the technology works.
The concept can easily draw comparisons to Spike Jonze’s Her, but that movie is clear with its futuristic setting where technology has evolved beyond its current state, developing a world to make the story plausible. One of the major downfalls of this shit is the fact that it clearly takes place in the present, or at least 2017, for they make so many dated name-dropping references to shit we don’t even do anymore. So, when Phil uncases his new phone (which doesn’t even have a manual setup, it just immediately starts speaking once turned on), the film really asks for far too much in terms of suspending your disbelief.
One can only suspend their disbelief for so long, but there comes a point where you have to say, “Enough is enough”, especially when it hamfisted an underdeveloped romance where it forces this clearly unlovable, shallow, insensitive creep to get with a woman who would’ve filed a restraining order against him upon their second encounter.
Alexandra Shipp, for the love of God, please fucking fire your agent. This has not been your year at all. I know you were screwed over with the X-Men movies and were severely underused as Storm, but every project you've been in outside of that resorts to the typical manic pixie love interest whose role is to be subservient to the painfully unattractive, creepy man. Cate is introduced as someone who clearly will not put up with Phil’s insensitive shit. Any woman would be immediately creeped out and not charmed, and the writers make it more problematic by having Phil literally stalk her and to win her affection. The way she’s written in this movie is even worse than how she’s written in Shaft (my worst movie of the year) where she’s turned on by men who use guns. Shipp has become the typical love interest in “bro-geared” comedies that female stand-up comics make fun, where they don’t even show a lick of how any sane woman would behave in her scenario, which is a shame because she has a great amount of energy and charming onscreen presence. The role she serves here shows how these writers perceive women, which hasn’t changed since The Hangover. Don’t use Bad Moms as an example because that shit is just as problematic in those films as well.
The central lead (Phil) is written to be so unlikable where yes, he does all in his power to avoid human contact until it benefits him, but as the movie progresses it’s clear that he’s completely (for the lack of a better word) retarded where he has no concept of how to interact with others. When he does — especially with the unbelievable budding romance with Cate — witnessing him on such a rushed, underdeveloped, unexciting, lifeless journey to escape the phone has absolutely no genuine growth to even be perceived as endearing when it obnoxiously wants you to feel it. You can't identify with him because he's a fucking incel — an incel who faces no consequences for his actions that often backfire on him and he just keeps getting rewarded. It’s not even Adam DeVine’s performance either, for he has proven countless times to be charming and funny when given the right material (Cc: The Righteous Gemstones, Isn’t It Romantic), it’s this film’s lazy writing forcing you to sympathize with these poorly conceived characters with terrible dialogue.
For this being a raunchy romantic comedy of sorts, the film is so damn unfunny in every degree. The film’s central base of humor lies with Rose Byrne’s monotonous, slightly disembodied voice within this A.I. saying crude, mean shit to Phil and everyone around him, becoming mindlessly (ironic for a smartphone) jealous when he develops feelings towards a human. All the jokes rely on either current or dated references or crass humor in a plot taken straight out of the generic checklist of ‘00s raunchy comedies, even down to the forced celebrity cameos that don’t garner any effective reactions. It’s not exciting that the biggest star you could afford is friggin’ Kid Cudi (no offense to Kid Cudi, of course), it’s just a damn shame. Actually no, I’m not going to do Cudi dirty like that. Let me take it further: when one of your set pieces in a comedy involves a game — two games of kickball with slo-mo shots of people getting knocked in the head with the rubber ball for comedic effect — it’s no secret how lazy the film is. There are recurring scenes where any “growth” to Phil and his “success” (I’m using quotations because they would never apply in reality) often concludes in scenes of a generic pop song playing as characters engage in endless and overabundant whimsical dance montages. What makes this even worse, more so than a studio comedy, is the gimmicky filmmaking. Its filmmaking format bears resemblance to a mockumentary where every shot is done in handheld and from a distance that when something Jexi-related causes a reaction, the camera would do a quick zoom on Phil’s face or the face of whoever her target is. Why is it filmed like a mockumentary when it clearly isn’t one? It’s just poor filmmaking. And you know these bastards got obnoxious too, for it’s one of those comedies where some scenes linger and take long pauses in hopes that you’ll laugh tremendously as some sequences go over the top for raunchiness and shock value, but they never so much as receive a chuckle.
Like technology, comedy is evolving. It’s excellent in the hands of great writers capable of telling great stories, ambitiously taking risks and raising the bar of the genre. Jexi is a reminder of the brand of comedy we are better off without. Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, two writers/directors whose shallow, obnoxiously dated style of writing peaked during a different era of comedy, serve as evidence of the worst and the laziest that can come out of the genre. This is the type of raunchy comedy that modern sketch shows satirize, but it goes literal with it thinking it's endearing when in reality it's pathetic and unfunny. This is proof that comedy is shifting and immature men writing comedy like teenagers in a time where even teenagers are proving to be more clever than them is just a pale excuse for this terrible film geared towards low IQ audiences who don't have any idea what comedy movies are meant to be. Seriously, fuck this movie. This is worse than both the Bad Moms movies combined, which is saying a lot. I hope Jon Lucas and Scott Moore don't get close to a screenplay or a camera for a long time because they're getting lazier with each feature and this is comedy at its bottom barrel laziest.
