When a character in a romcom tells herself “You’re a smart, capable woman,” the odds are good that she’s uptight, romantically frustrated and ripe for comic humiliation. Oh, yeah, and she’s gonna fall in love. After 35-year-old “sassy weather girl” Sylvia (O’Kelley) loses it on the air and rips into her cheating anchorman boyfriend (Harmon), she finds herself unemployed, unemployable and mooching off her slacker younger brother Walt (Devlin). Before you can say love/hate, she’s verbally sparring with and then sleeping with his best friend Byron (Adams) in a totally “no-strings-attached” deal. Where could this be going?
O’Kelley has an extensive background in television (she’s one of the mean rich women on The New Adventures of Old Christine), and she sells the comedy hard in a way that might work better on the small screen. In fact, the supporting players are drawn from O’Kelley’s television past, and their performances are all a bit too broad. Curiously, it’s relative unknowns Adams and Devlin who fare the best.
Once Sylvia and Byron start to move from sex to something more, O’Kelley settles down, and the movie becomes more endearing and less grating. But it never quite shakes the sitcom wackiness.