An Uneventful Wait

I recently watched the movie Waiting... A friend had mentioned it was "pretty funny," and it did have a number of very funny people in it, including Ryan Reynolds, Anna Faris, and Justin Long. Still, I didn't have a lot of expectations of it.

Which was about right, as I didn't get a lot out of it. I actually found it somewhat comparable to this year's Adventureland, another comedy revolving around a tough "service industry" job. Adventureland, however, offered more of a plot.

Put simply, this movie didn't have much of a plot at all. It was simply one day at a restaurant, with loose elements of one character having a crisis over what his life has amounted to, and another having to show around a new trainee at the restaurant. Neither one of these threads gather enough momentum to truly constitute a story, though.

Really, the movie is just a framework for a bunch of jokes, many of them of the "gross out" variety, a few of them rather homophobic. (And not really excused by them "hanging a bell on it" by having one of the characters point it out.) Though when it's not being overly juvenile (which is most of the time), it does generate a few laughs. More in total, I think, than the movie I likened it to, Adventureland. Or perhaps it was just personal familiarity (having once worked the longest couple months of my life at a restaurant) making me give a average movie a bit of a pass.

Not too much of a pass, though. This still only amounted to a C+ movie. It's probably not a waste of time, given that it barely runs 90 minutes. Still, you could easily spend the time in better ways.