Sometimes movie plots come in bundles. For asteroid-collision disaster flicks, when there was Armageddon, there was also Deep Impact. And with recent films delving into permissive marital infidelity, such as Hall Pass and The Freebie, there’s now Did You Kiss Anyone?
Jared (Bryce Flint-Sommerville) and Emily (Amanda Charr) have hit that stage in their marriage where they’re a bit too comfortable with each other, something exemplified by a particularly explosive evening of diarrhea for Emily that she seems disinclined to hide from her hubby by closing the bathroom door. This comfort is interrupted not too long after, however, when Emily leafs through Jared’s sketchbook to find a cartoon character that looks an awful lot like her husband engaged in various sexual acts with cartoon women who look nothing like her. While Jared protests that its a character and not supposed to be him, Emily thinks otherwise and Jared admits that, yes, he fantasizes a bit and wishes that someone had told him that they would meet and fall in love so that he could get rid of all those urges and fantasies beforehand.
Emily then proposes a simple solution: a one-night free pass where Jared can have sex with whoever he wants, without consequence. Likewise, she too will head out that same night for her own extra-marital adventures. Jared accepts, and the rest of the film focuses on the two as they go about their free evening, trying to hook up with complete strangers.
Again, this isn’t entirely new subject matter for film in recent years, not even independent film, so it’s hard to keep the mind from wandering to those other tales to compare and contrast, but I’m going to focus on exactly what I liked or didn’t like about this film. And it’s a mixed bag, because I did enjoy the film on the whole, but I also felt it stumbled quite a bit.
I think my biggest issue with the film came down to likeability, in particular the Emily character (not the actor, mind you; I think Amanda Charr played the role great, I just wasn’t always happy with the role). While relations between her and Jared are fine, her character is also the co-host of a public television cooking show, and she’s actually a pretty horrible boss. She gets a little too abrasive with the production assistant fetching her coffee, for example, and it put her in the “don’t like” corner for me.
That coupled with, of the two, her abundant willingness to achieve her extra-marital goal made me wonder, is she really reacting to Jared’s fantasies, or was she just looking for an excuse to step out and he walked right into it? She just left me a little cold. Which isn’t to say that Jared is some hero in all of this. While he seemed to carry more reluctance at going through with the evening after things got going, he still agreed to it.
That said, of the two, Emily’s adventures were easier to take, and far more humorous, than Jared’s. In fact, his make an extreme left turn into WhatTheFuckVille, resulting in a single act of gruesome brutality that, not only didn’t I see it coming, I still have trouble reconciling that it happened in this particular movie.
Overall, Did You Kiss Anyone? was middle ground fare for me. There was nothing so awful in it to make me go, “this flick is horrendous,” but I also am hard-pressed to find too much to praise about it. It’s got some real funny moments, and if you’re one of us in the married club, there may be a bit or two with which you can relate, but it doesn’t hit quite as often as I wish it had.
This film was submitted for review through our Submission for Review system. If you have a film you’d like us to see, and we aren’t already looking into it on our own, you too can utilize this service.
