LARRY CROWNE

“LARRY CROWNE” (Tom Hanks & Julia Roberts)

This isn’t “Charlie Wilson’s War” by any means; which proves every movie is better with Philip Seymour Hoffman in it. The re-teaming of Hanks & Roberts has very little life and absolutely no chemistry whatsoever. Hanks is fine as the title character who is unexpectedly fired from his job at ‘U Mart’; but Roberts, who actually brought something different to the table in CW’s War, is as bland as she’s been in practically every other movie she’s been in.
But the premise is kind of far fetched which gets it off to a rocky start – Okay, if you’re a businessman who’s worked his way up the corporate ladder through many years of diligence and excellent workmanship and the board of directors discover you never went to college so they feel as though they need to ‘let you go’ since you’ve gone as far as you can according to their dumb rules that every executive must have a college degree, I can accept that – But a ‘U Mart’ employee??? Are you telling me most people who gather up empty carts around shopping mall parking lots and return them to the store are college educated? And Larry Crowne does this with glee; a perfect employee for such a business – More than eager to help customers, doing any duty that needs tending and doing it all with a sincere smile on his face. It would have made more sense if they laid Larry off because he’d been at U Mart for too long and was making too high a wage due to years of raises. Trust me, I know what it’s like to be downsized no matter how loyal you’ve been to the company so that they can save a couple of thousand dollars a year by bringing in someone younger and willing to work for less. If they’d used that reasoning for Larry’s dismissal, I’d have accepted the premise.
Over-all I think the problem with Larry Crowne is that the supplemental characters are relatively uninteresting; I liked the gorgeous black coed that calls Larry ‘Lance’, but I wanted to see that May/December romance blossom instead of Larry and his stick-up-her-butt disinterested in her job teacher (Mrs. Tainot)
Cedric T. Entertainer (Get a real name, would you, Clyde?) plays Larry’s bartering neighbor whose business is running a sixteen hour a day garage sale from his front yard. His shtick is to over-price his merchandise and come down just a few dollars at a time as numbers are bartered back & forth... No, it isn’t even funny the first time.
Larry buys a scooter from him because he can no longer afford the gas to fill up his SUV. Which, of course, leads to Larry offering Mrs. Tainot a ride home but only if she wears the stupid helmet – which, of course, she says she will NOT do & then in the next scene she is seen wearing the stupid helmet while riding on the back of Larry’s scooter. Oh, what hilarity!
Now, George Takei as an economics professor that thinks he knows the answer to every economic problem in the world got a few chuckles from me, but for what was promoted as being a comedy, this film doesn’t really have any memorable lines or scenes.
‘Larry Crowne’ is a film with good intentions and it is ‘likeable’ enough – it just doesn’t go anywhere interesting. Larry loses his job, buys a scooter and takes a couple of classes at the local junior college so the next job he works at for 20 years won’t fire him for not having a degree... Like the fry cook job he takes to make ends meet.