I just watched a movie that I absolutely had no feeling towards whatsoever. I can't say that I hated it, because I didn't. But I certainly didn't like it. To be honest, I cannot believe that Zach Braff chose to make "The Last Kiss" as his follow up to the outstanding "Garden State", a movie I felt so passionately for that I went to see it twice in the theater.
It's incredibly, horribly hard to feel anything for a character in a movie who does something so shitty as what Braff's character does to his girlfriend. He's too freaked out to marry her, but pretends to be cool when she gets pregnant. I mean, they're both on the cusp of 30, and it's a pretty natural time to be starting a family. So he acts cool, plays like he's happy, and quietly and completely freaks out. Fine, okay, I can understand all this. But then he cheats on her. He kisses someone, and when she freaks out, he drives to this little chippy's dorm room and fucks her. There's no other way to put it. And understandably, pregnant girlfriend doesn't want him to come back home. She's having none of it.
I wasn't sympathetic to Braff's character in the least. He was a shithead for cheating, and he was a shithead for making excuses like "I'm scared" (whine whine whine). Maybe I'm an unforgiving bitch, but real partners don't cheat on their pregnant girlfriends when they're scared of the pregnancy. And I don't think that she should have taken him back, though that is the indication given at the end of the movie. I know she's pregnant, but dude, he cheated. Once a cheater, always a cheater. I've never had a real-life experience that didn't bear this maxim out.
I'm not sure what the filmmakers were going for. Were we supposed to feel for him? Were we supposed to root for her to take him back? Either way, the movie wasn't successful, because I didn't do either. Anyway. I was so angry about a film that would make excuses for a cheater that I had to write about it.
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