People Like Us

People Like Us follows Chris Pine’s Sam as he reluctantly attends his estranged father’s funeral and is subsequently stunned to learn that he has an adult sister (Elizabeth Banks’ Frankie) and a scrappy nephew (Michael Hall D’Addario’s Josh), with Sam’s head-scratching decision not to immediately divulge this information to Frankie laying the groundwork for a narrative that stretches credibility at every turn. Filmmaker Alex Kurtzman, working from a script cowritten with Roberto Orci and Jody Lambert, has infused People Like Us with a slick and extensively generic feel that is, at the outset, counterbalanced by the compelling performances, as star Pine’s irresistibly charming turn is complemented by an off-kilter supporting cast that includes, among others, Philip Baker Hall, Michelle Pfeiffer, Mark Duplass, and Jon Favreau. The movie’s bland yet watchable atmosphere persists right up until Sam begins passing himself off as a random stranger to Banks’ character, with the hopeless artificiality of this twist adversely coloring everything that follows and ultimately rendering the movie’s positive attributes moot. (It doesn’t help, either, that the film’s pace grows more and more plodding as time progresses.) There is, as a result, little doubt that Kurtzman’s climactic attempts at eliciting an emotional response from the viewer fall entirely (and palpably) flat, and it’s finally difficult to recall a movie leveled so definitively and so pervasively by a plot development (ie it’s just that hokey and unbelievable).

** out of ****