Boys and Girls

Directed by Robert Iscove, Boys and Girls charts the years-long friendship between Freddie Prinze Jr.’s Ryan and Claire Forlani’s Jennifer and the degree to which that friendship informs their everyday lives. It’s a decent-enough premise that is, for the most part, employed to woefully uninvolving and underwhelming effect by Iscove, as the filmmaker, working from The Drews’ screenplay, delivers a meandering, padded-out comedy that contains exceedingly little in the way of forward momentum – which, in turn, paves the way for a hit-and-miss narrative that is, for the most part, far more miss than hit. (The eye-rollingly larger-than-life dance number that comes about halfway through is indicative of the movie’s wrongheaded sensibilities, ultimately.) And although Prinze Jr. and Forlani are charming enough here, albeit in an excessively bland sort of way, Boys and Girls suffers from a paucity of compelling periphery figures that compounds its arms-length, decidedly less-than-enthralling atmosphere – with, especially, Jason Biggs’ grating turn as Ryan’s best friend certainly not doing the picture any favors. The will-they-or-won’t-they vibe does, as a result, wear out its welcome long before the film arrives at its anticlimactic final stretch, which finally cements Boys and Girls‘ place as an entirely disposable endeavor that feels long at just 94 minutes.

** out of ****