Just Friends
"Just Friends" is funnier than any low-rent rip-off of "There's Something About Mary" has a right to be. It's crass, it's unsophisticated, it aims right for the slapsticky pleasure center of the under-30 moviegoer's brain. So sue me, I laughed. A lot.
And I don't even like Ryan Reynolds, the smart-alecky actor who seems cobbled together from leftover pieces of Chevy Chase, Jimmy Fallon, Bill Murray, and Jason Lee. Reynolds has achieved stardom by snarking his way through teen comedies such as "Van Wilder" and the recent "Waiting . . .," but up to now he hasn't been an actor so much as an attitude with legs. "Just Friends" shows he's capable of edging out onto the branch of date-movie respectability.
First, though, the film has to get him out of the fat suit. When the movie opens, it's 1995 and Chris Brander (Reynolds) is a New Jersey high school senior who looks like Jiminy Glick's kid brother and acts like Richard Simmons's. He also nourishes a crush on Jamie Palamino (Amy Smart), the friendly, outgoing cheerleader who's been his best-friend-forever since, well, forever. Can a husky lad who lip-synchs the lyrics to All-4-One's "I Swear" into his bedroom mirror get the girl of his dreams? Not in movies like this.
Cut to 2005 and Chris has grown up to be -- no, not gay, though the character does maintain an interesting touch of swish -- but a slim, uber-successful Hollywood music executive with models clinging to him like lint.
Enter the film's comedy secret weapon: Anna Faris as Samantha James, an incomprehensibly celebrated pop star who combines the gentility of Courtney Love, the modesty of Gwen Stefani, and the multileveled talents of Jessica Simpson. Chris has to get this creature from Los Angeles to New York, but through a handful of absurd plot contrivances the two are stranded in his hometown for the Christmas holidays.
Screenwriter Adam Davis and director Roger Kumble have one good idea: They know that anyone trying to prove they've left high school behind will revert to their dorkiest teenage incarnation the moment they return. So the more Chris has a chance to show Jamie -- now a bartender and substitute teacher -- that he has escaped "the friend zone," the more the film works overtime to humiliate him. I won't describe the process by which the hero reacquires his adolescent mouth retainer, but it's painfully funny.
As filmmaking, "Just Friends" is slovenly: It's visually dingy, haphazardly structured, and it breaks down before it crosses the finish line. As a vibe, though, the movie's unusually happy, and the thanks goes to the cast. Smart is her reliable, grounded self, and Chris Klein shows some overdue comic flair as Chris's fellow teen wonk who has morphed into a romantic rival (his role is the film's most blatant theft from "There's Something About Mary"). Julie Hagerty of "Airplane!" turns up as Chris's ditsy mother, and Christopher Marquette is his brother Mike, slack-jawed with incipient teen lust at the notion of the Samantha James staying under his roof. The brothers' relationship -- it could be summed up as one long, loving punch-out -- is a high point of the movie.
With all that, "Just Friends" belongs to Anna Faris, and why an actress this smart and insanely uninhibited isn't getting above-the-title offers is a mystery. Samantha is a star who never filters out a bad idea -- she doesn't have good ones -- and who acts on every impulse, especially those that cause problems for other people. At the same time she retains a little girl's faith in herself as an artiste. Faris has the enthusiasm, if not the focus, of a great clown, and to see her zonked out on Vicodin and drooling toothpaste into Chris's ear after a minor Taser mishap is to enter low-comedy heaven.
More than anything, "Just Friends" reminds this '80s survivor of the rambunctious teen comedies directed by "Savage" Steve Holland and starring the young John Cusack -- films such as "Better Off Dead" and "One Crazy Summer." Those weren't art, and neither is this. But they were cheerful and inventive and sloppily assured -- and so is this.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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