You may know the actor Jake Johnson from his role as Nick on the comedy series New Girl. He tends to play the same character in most everything he’s in, a guy who seems at first glance like he’s basically with it, but who reveals himself to be a kind of disordered, emotionally stunted weirdo.
This isn’t a criticism, by the way—there’s nothing wrong with sticking with what you’re good at, and Johnson does this very well. He stars as a similar character in Self Reliance, which he also wrote and directed, knowing his own strengths. Johnson’s character, Tommy, has a good job but lives with his mother, and is still hung up on a girlfriend who left him two years earlier. He’s walking down the street when a limousine pulls up and the actor Andy Samberg rolls down the window and tells him to get in, at which point he’s taken to a warehouse and offered the chance to win a million dollars if he competes in a dark web game show that involves a bunch of people trying to murder him for 30 days. Naturally, Tommy accepts.
The setup is delightfully silly, and something Johnson has always had a knack for is acting like everyone elseis crazy for not being on board with whatever insane thing he’s doing, and that he’s the totally normal one. And he plays that to great effect here—I found myself laughing quite a bit as the whole movie was revving up.
Unfortunately, he can’t keep it all going, as he tries to cram too many things into 90 minutes, and his intentions become muddy. A romantic plot involving Anna Kendrick both takes up the entire middle of the film and also feels like an afterthought, and at some point what’s happening with Tommy just starts to feel sad instead of funny. This doesn’t seem to be Johnson’s goal, but, again, it becomes hard to tell what he wants to do here. The film’s early nonsense is so much fun that I wish Johnson could have recaptured it by the end, but instead, the movie just kind of peters out, like air slowly, slowly leaking out of a ball.
Self Reliance is on Hulu January 12th.
