Once upon a time, spoof movies were a legitimate form of entertainment that even audiences who weren’t botched lobotomy victims could enjoy. They’d take a handful of recent trends in movies, exaggerate them to the point of ridiculousness—successfully lampooning whatever trope was their target—and usually they’d be packed full of a bunch of other random gags to boot. Fun. Then all of those Scary Movie-wannabe spoofs that Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer made came along, and a precedent was set that all a movie needed to do in order to be a spoof was recreate scenes from popular movies beat for beat, with no punchlines, and a bunch of humorless zombies would keep buying tickets to them anyway. The spoof movie felt dead.
The good news for us is that director David Wain (Role Models, Wanderlust) and his Wet Hot American Summer co-writer Michael Showalter have reunited to bring the art form back to life. Their new movie, They Came Together, stars Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler as a couple who are relaying the story of how they met cute and got together while out to dinner with friends (Bill Hader and Ellie Kemper). You see, They Came Together is a spoof of romantic comedies, a proper one, that not only satirizes all of the tired clichés, recycled character types, and re-heated plot elements of one of the most consistently lazy and consistently watched film genres out there, but that also packs itself full of a bunch of other random gags for good measure.
Like Wet Hot American Summer, the humor of They Came Together is pretty Meta, it’s pretty absurdist, and it’s pretty dang funny. With a supporting cast this deep (Christopher Meloni, Max Greenfield, Cobie Smulders, Michael Ian Black, Ed Hems, etc…), it pretty much had to be. The thing that keeps the film from getting over that quality hump that would make it an easy recommendation, however, is that it’s really just a series of gags that make fun of romantic comedies, and not so much a solid story that stands on its own. The best spoof movies don’t just satirize a genre, they hold up as a solid entry in that genre as well, and this one is nowhere near doing that. Wet Hot American Summer was able to get away with not telling a real story because it was so insane and so packed full of boundary-pushing humor, but, comparatively, They Came Together is a much tamer experience that seems to be much more concerned with not alienating the norms, and it suffers for the restraint. It’s a funny movie, for sure, it’s just not the kind of thing that anyone is going to need to watch more than once.
