Jexi

Workaholics' Adam DeVine and the disembodied voice of Rose Byrne are wonderfully puerile fun in this sweet but dirty-minded rom-com.

Surely, bland cultural insights can't defeat a film whose main attraction is the promise of stupid, raunchy fun? Reader, Jexi fails even at that...

The stranded DeVine, for all his goofy charms as an actor, quickly exhausts our patience; he's in nearly every frame of this movie, and his screen partner is a phone, which means a hell of a lot of mugging for the camera.

Lucas and Moore's film is filled with bugs, making it easy to unplug from its attempts to entertain and do literally anything else.

Jexi feels hopelessly out of step with the moment. Despite its subject matter, it's a flip phone movie in a smart phone world.

Lucas and Moore write some whiplash funny lines, and since the film is just a throwaway, you can enjoy it on a trivial synthetic revenge-of-the-nerd level.

What makes this comedy mildly, and even unexpectedly, enjoyable is the voice work of Rose Byrne, who voices the virtual assistant, Jexi. Her comic delivery, while still robotic, is full of well-timed gems.

If you go into this movie knowing it's a sometimes puerile romcom about embracing technology and some of the downsides to it, then you'll enjoy it more. Or at all.

The entire premise of Jexi, that a broken man needs to be fixed by a woman, has no place in modern-day filmmaking.

It is a good proposal to have a fun time and without more pretensions. [Full review in Spanish]