A new review from The Movie Snob.
What If (B-). This is a fairly standard romantic comedy, elevated slightly in my estimation by the winsomeness of the female lead, Zoe Kazan (Ruby Sparks). Our male lead is a pallid, cynical fellow named Wallace (Daniel Radcliffe, from those interminable Harry Potter movies). Wally dropped out of med school after breaking up with his cheating girlfriend, and now he has a dead-end job and lives in his sister’s attic. But then he goes to a party and meets a quirky gal named Chantry (Kazan) (yes, her character’s name is “Chantry”). Before you can say “Zooey Deschanel,” the two hit it off and he walks her home—to the home, he unhappily discovers, that she shares with her boyfriend of five years, Ben (Rafe Spall, Prometheus). But the emotionally unavailable Chantry still wants to be friends with Wallace, and after a second encounter with Chantry the obviously smitten Wallace decides to live in the Friend Zone and see how things go. It’s decent, as rom-coms go, and I like that the filmmakers didn’t go the obvious route of making Ben some sort of hideous jerk. But on the other hand, the cutesy scenes comes off as contrived, and the supposed-to-be-clever dialogue is occasionally coarse and seldom clever. So, call it an average movie with an above-averagely appealing female star.
