Checked out the new comedy Jexi… a movie you probably haven’t heard about. I saw exactly one trailer for it (which actually made me chuckle) and no commercials. So this is a movie sent to die… I’m surprised they didn’t just make it a streaming flick.
So Jexi is a movie staring Adam Driver who gets a new phone with a digital assistant named Jexi. Jexi appears to be sentient and very, very mean. I’d say she’s passive aggressive but really she’s just aggressive. She is programmed to make his life better, by any means necessary (like cussing out his boss in an attempt to get him fired from his list-making job at a BuzzFeed-like company). He then meets a girl who Jexi poorly helps him get a date with… and then she (Jexi) gets jealous and tries to sabotage them.
So… this looks to me a like a cute little romantic comedy about a shy nerdy guy and the cool girl who owns her own bicycle shop that had a high-concept comedy about a mean Siri bolted onto it. Or a high-concept comedy about a mean Siri that had a cute, basic romantic comedy bolted on. I’m not sure and neither side of the movie really jibes well with the other.
That said, if you like cute little romantic comedies, this movie works reasonably well. It’s not the best and it’s not as funny as it could be but the two leads are charming and they have cute and fun dialog. And if you would prefer a ribald comedy where most of the jokes are based on the volume of four letter words coming out of Siri (aka Jexi), then you might like this movie too. Since I laughed at a lot of the blue comedy even though it was kind of always the same joke.
The movie is a Frankenstein’s monster of two disparate movies… but its reasonably entertaining. I’d mostly recommend it to people who like the romantic comedy side and who don’t mind a lot of crass humor on the side. It’s not a great movie and, honestly, I doubt anyone is going to go hunting it down but if you catch it some day on HBO or whatever and you are bored, check it out.
Score: 73