Film Review | 50/50

Poor Bryce Dallas Howard.

Despite (or perhaps because of) her showbiz-friendly family connections and undeniably good looks, casting directors have not made it easy for us to fall in love with her.

The redheaded daughter of Ron Howard - director of crowd-pleasers A Beautiful Mind and The Da Vinci Code... and late of Happy Days, where he was Fonz's floppy haired best friend Richie - played a grade-A bitch in the 60s-set racial segregation hit The Help, where her character not only affects a snooty attitude to her black servants, but also heads a reform that would have them use separate bathrooms.

Now she's back on bitchy form in 50/50, where she plays the slightly less aggressive (instead being horribly passive) girlfriend to Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Adam, a 27-year-old radio program writer who finds out he has cancer soon after we first meet the sheltered, shy young man (he hasn't learned to drive yet, partly because he worries that it's just too dangerous). The clincher: doctors say he has a 50/50 chance of survival.

Perhaps it's fortunate for Howard that her character actually ends up being rather peripheral to the overall story, which largely centres on Adam's relationship with his best friend Kyle (Seth Rogen) as both of them come to terms - in their own unique way - with Adam's terminal illness. In what is an otherwise a pretty simple, loosely spread out story (with not much plot and very little incident), the only crinkle in the funny-sad canvas arrives in the shape of Adam's young therapist Katherine (Anna Kendrick), whose inexperience is at first infuriating but, gradually, gives Adam some hope in what looks to be a bleak - and rapidly-diminishing - future.

The story is based on screenwriter Will Reiser's own battle with cancer, one which Rogen himself nursed him through. If this means that Rogen plays himself, then the portly comedy super star has been playing himself all along - from Knocked Up to Zack and Miri Make a Porno to Pineapple Express. He comes armed with the same curly-dirty hairdo, the same crude jokes and the same predilection towards marijuana (whether it is consumed in spliff or pastry form) and, really, it's getting a bit tired now. Even though a foil of toilet-and-sex humour is welcome in what is otherwise an emotionally draining story... the fact is that this sad-funny formula is getting a bit reptitive too.

Because if this sad-funny mix was a clever-clever indie innovation up until a few years ago, it has firmly solidified into Hollywood cliché by now. Juno, Knocked Up, Love and Other Drugs were all enjoyable (though by the time we got to the latter, the signs of genre-juggling fatigue were already becoming evident). But even though 50/50 is inspired by a true story, it works on a narrative rhythm that's becoming sadly all too familiar to us.

As it stands, here we have a film with a promising premise that unfolds passively, peppered with a handful of semi-decent jokes and some charming performances - Kendrick is particularly endearing - with not much in between. A screenwriter like Juno's Diablo Cody would have added some necessary zing to the dialogue, and taken the cancer angle to slightly more memorable, risqué waters. Perhaps the story was too close for comfort for Reiser.

Neither does the sporadic appearance of Anjelica Huston, as Adam's panic-ridden mother, contribute much. Which is a shame, really, because on top of discovering that her son has cancer, her character has also been dealing with her husband's Alzheimer's. You get the sense that she would have a far more interesting story to tell.

Really, you could say the same for Rachel, Bryce Dallas Howard's maligned girlfriend who, despite her faults, would at least have made for an interestingly flawed perspective-character.

But what we get is another stoner bromance which, while funny and emotionally poignant at times, is really a lot less life-affirming than it thinks it is.