Irresistible

Directed by Jon Stewart, Irresistible follows political strategist Gary Zimmer (Steve Carell) as he arrives in a small town to help a fired-up veteran (Chris Cooper’s Jack Hastings) run for mayor – with the ensuing campaign, which eventually morphs into a media spectacle, prompting the arrival of Gary’s fierce rival (Rose Byrne’s Faith Brewster). It’s a fairly compelling setup that is, at the outset, employed to exceedingly promising and entertaining effect by Stewart, as the writer/director does a superb job of establishing the movie’s offbeat characters and eliciting strong, charismatic work from his various actors – with Carell’s typically magnetic performance matched by an appreciatively eclectic supporting cast that includes Topher Grace, Mackenzie Davis, and Will Sasso. (It is, however, Cooper’s predictably sterling turn as the salt-of-the-earth Hastings that remains the picture’s most potent attribute.) There’s little doubt, then, that Irresistible‘s watchable vibe slowly-but-surely begins to wane as it enters its wheel-spinning and distressingly generic midsection, with the narrative’s proliferation of less-than-subtle elements growing more and more difficult to swallow and, ultimately, paving the way for a hopelessly anticlimactic third act (ie the whole thing peters out to an almost stunning degree). The relatively clever finale can’t, unfortunately, compensate for the ineffectiveness of everything that precedes it, which does, in the end, cement Irresistible‘s place as a well-intentioned misfire that could (and should) have been so much better.

** out of ****