The Big Sick Review
The perfect romantic comedy is a tough thing to achieve. It’s a hard balancing act that requires having just the right amount of laughs and heartfelt moments without turning into a cheesy cliché. You need to charm the audience and make them buy into the relationship you are presenting on screen. If that doesn’t happen, the whole thing comes crumbling down.
In general, the cinematic comedy world has been experiencing a dry spell. We get the occasional hit but it seems that its best days are past us. One of the directors we have to thank for a lot of these rare hits is Judd Apatow. Besides just straight out comedies, he’s also given us some really strong romantic comedies like The 40 Year Old Virgin and Trainwreck.
The Big Sick, produced by Apatow, is very much in the same style as those other films. The screenplay by Silicon Valley’s Kumail Nanjiani and his wife Emily V. Gordon, based on the true story of how they met, provides a lot of heart to the story. One major issue with modern-day comedies is the lack of purpose/meaning a lot of them clearly suffer from. Slapstick humor can be great but it seems like nowadays, it’s all about getting to the next fart or dick joke as opposed to developing a strong story. The Big Sick absolutely has those one-liners that it builds towards but it also has a ton of heart and emotion. It feels like the movie has a message and it explores some very important aspects of our lives and how we deal with tragedy. The relationships between the characters feel genuine and you are able to connect yourself with each one of them.
The Big Sick also sticks the landing with what any comedy needs to succeed and that’s the humor. There are the occasional moments when it feels like it’s trying too hard to get a laugh but overall the jokes hit. They are well thought out and don’t overly rely on raunchiness and shock to get a reaction out of the audience. There’s one 9/11 joke in it that could be one of the best lines in a comedy from the past 10 years.
That brings up another thing I appreciated about The Big Sick that a lot of creators seem to miss the mark on. Politics is more prevalent than ever. However, whenever a movie or TV show tries to incorporate it into the story it often feels forced, seeming to push a certain agenda over another. This movie doesn’t do that. It’s not a huge element of the film but whenever a topic is brought up it feels natural and relevant to pushing the story and characters forward. It also offers up some very true and honest opinions that touch on both sides of an issue.
The Big Sick isn’t without it’s flaws though. The biggest one I have is the hype surrounding it. Regardless of it being fair or not, if you hear such amazing things about a certain film, you can’t help but expect a lot out of it. I’ve been reading reviews that say this is one of the best romantic comedies of the 2000’s and that this is by far the top film of the year. Sometimes movies that have so much buzz around them meet expectations(like Baby Driver) and sometimes they fall short. While I really enjoyed my time in the theatre, I didn’t feel like The Big Sick met the hype and I was left wanting more from it.
Another issue was what seems to be a common problem with all films Judd Apatow has his hands in. They usually always hit around the 2 hour mark and almost always feel around 15-20 minutes too long. It’s so weird because movies like Gone Girl or The Social Network are all above 2 hours and still leave you wanting more. Comedies don’t seem to be able to do that as well.
The Big Sick is one of the stronger comedies put out in the past few years. It feels like it was made for a reason. It shares a couple’s crazy story about their relationship and shares some important life lessons. I’d recommend seeing it. Everyone seems to like it and small, independent films like this need more support. 7.5/10
