“Home Again” has its heart in the right place with a “Full House” type story of three young guys helping a single woman raise her two girls. This is a rom com, but a typical one with your standard cliches and usual awkwardness.
Reese Witherspoon stars as Alice, a single mother and the daughter of a great filmmaker and famous actress (Candice Bergen), who moves her two daughters from New York to her hometown in Los Angeles. She’s turning 40, and she has a lot on her plate: starting her interior decorating business, getting her girls settled, and struggling with the fact she has been separated from her husband (Michael Sheen) for five months.
On her birthday, she starts partying with three young filmmakers, Harry (Pico Alexander), George (Jon Rudnitsky), and Teddy (Natt Wolf), and they need a place to crash until they strike a movie deal. The “Full House” turns on, when her mother suggests she let the three crash at her place, and they end up helping her raise the girls. Among the boys, Harry is attracted to Alice, and as much as she thinks it’s weird for a 40-year-old to date a youngster, they hit it off.
“Home Again” is produced by the usually sweet Nancy Meyers and written and directed by Hallie Meyers-Shyer (a background actress from Meyers’ “Father of the Bride” and “What Women Want”). It has some nice performances from Witherspoon, Rudnitsky, Bergen, and Sheen, and there’s nothing irritating at all.
But my problem is it’s not that special. The youngster affair is phony and lame; the girls are nothing special; the turning points are predictable; and the jokes are like blanks in a gun. I’ve seen better movies of its kind, and I think we can agree I don’t need to tell you what. In fact, it’s one of those rom coms I recommend you’d watch on TV, not in a movie theater.
⭐️⭐️1/2
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