Listen, I’m a viewer who will excuse many, many sins for a film that goes for it. There have been countless times I’ve ended a screening with the thought, “Well, at least I didn’t see that coming.” It’s faint praise, but in my book, it’s praise nonetheless. Safe choices have their place, but who doesn’t love a big old swing for the fences?
Jake Johnson’s directorial debut, Self Reliance, does, indeed, swing away. If you squint, you can almost see Johnson rounding third, you can almost hear the crowd chanting his name, you can almost imagine the movie he thought he was making. Self Reliance—part modern noir, part cultural commentary, part surrealist comedy—is precisely the kind of movie that’s easy to love when done right, and pretty difficult to like when done poorly. Unfortunately, Self Reliance falls securely under the latter.
Part of the issue here is the difficult place Johnson has put himself in as the director, star, and writer of the film. This is a movie with an incredibly high concept that must be presented in a way that doesn’t immediately derail the entire endeavor. Johnson does it by presenting us with Tommy, a man in a clear rut who—as introduced in montage—lives essentially the same day on repeat. That is, until Andy Samberg (playing himself) presents him with a chance to participate in the dark web’s most popular reality show in which Tommy must survive for 30 days while assassins from around the world attempt to kill him.
Obviously, they can only kill him if he’s alone. And obviously, there are cameras being placed everywhere by a team of ninja production assistants. And obviously…OK, none of this is obvious, and the lengthy scene in which the rules of this game (and, in turn, the movie) are explained in detail to Tommy is the first in a series of clunky expositional turns that undercut the clear absurdity of the whole thing. High concept doesn’t mean convoluted concept, and more often than not it feels like the complicated rules are a way to structure the narrative rather than to serve as a jumping off point.
This knottiness is mirrored in the film’s many, often clashing, tones. Once the game is afoot, Tommy must take advantage of a loophole that says he can’t be murdered in the company of another person. This gives us a chance to see how truly alone he is in his everyday life, and allows Johnson to fall into his loveable loser routine at which he is, admittedly, quite adept. It also allows for the movie to introduce some new foils to his journey, which include an unhoused man played by I Think You Should Leave’s Biff Wiff and the always-quirky, mostly charming Anna Kendrick as Maddy. Thanks to the former, we get about 20 minutes of bizarro buddy comedy; the latter, a good half-hour of romcom playfulness and a hint of sexual tension. Where these fit into the rest of the movie is an excellent question—especially the business with Kendrick, which is in many ways both the best part of the movie and the most nonsensical.
Self Reliance is precisely the kind of movie that’s easy to love when done right, and pretty difficult to like when done poorly. Unfortunately, it falls securely under the latter.
Not settling on a single mood can be a mood in and of itself, but certainly raises the difficulty level of a movie that, again, is already trying to walk a tightrope of absurdity that few seasoned writers and directors could pull off, let alone a first-timer. The world of this movie is somehow both far too absurd to be taken at face value and not nearly otherworldly enough to fully lean into its surrealist ambitions. There are several times in Self Reliance in which characters comment on the events with some variation of “This is so weird,” almost as if Johnson is saying, “Yeah, I know, stay with me.” This kind of narrative safety rail is almost never necessary in a good movie, and fundamentally betrays the issues at the heart of a bad one.
Johnson has carved out a nice career for himself as an actor, and his choice to cash in some of that capital on a film like this is admirable. But there’s simply too much wrong with Self Reliance to hold tightly to its charms. An action-packed buddy comedy with Biff Wiff might have worked great; a more surrealist take on the The Game certainly had potential; and no one in their right mind says no to an off-beat romantic comedy starring Jake Johnson and Anna Kendrick. But stitched together, it becomes a bit of a mess.
