Entertainment

People don’t need ‘People’

Cocky, ’80s-era Tom Cruise didn’t seem like the hardest act in the world to pull off at the time, yet few in today’s generation of the young, dumb and full of, er, confidence can match him.

Mastering the born salesman’s flashbulb smile, the index fingers pointing up like goal posts, the fast-talking and shades-wearing proved beyond Jake Gyllenhaal in “Love and Other Drugs.” Now it’s Chris Pine’s turn to step up and whiff in the teary drama “People Like Us,” one of those “heartfelt” dramas that was obviously dreamed up to win awards but fell short and is instead being dumped before awards season.

Pine plays an ethically flexible sales dude (actually, he’s in the big-time barter industry, whatever that is) who, when told by his girlfriend (Olivia Wilde, increasingly resembling a javelin with cheekbones) that his dad is dead, says, “What’s for dinner?”

Sam (Pine) didn’t get along with Dad, a rock-music producer who left his son nothing but some old records — and a leather bag containing $150,000. This money is to be delivered to a boy named Josh (Michael Hall D’Addario) and his barmaid mom Frankie (Elizabeth Banks). A little elementary sleuthing reveals that she is Sam’s half-sister by another mother.

Sam, while staying with his disapproving mom (Michelle Pfeiffer) in LA, muses aloud that maybe he’ll just go ahead and keep the money, which is the kind of disposable first-act character trait that every person in the audience knows is meant simply to be the starting point for an “arc” of glorious change. His girlfriend leaves him in a huff, but so little thought went into her (“she’s nice” seems to be all the writers bothered to imagine) that you’ll hardly notice.

If Sam is such a heel (at least in Act 1), why does he stalk Frankie’s son and strike up a warm friendship with him in a CD store? And why does he also stalk Frankie herself and begin a weirdly flirtatious friendship? There are a dozen reasons why he should tell her he’s her brother, and he’ll have to tell her eventually anyway, but here’s the only reason he doesn’t: because he’s a character in a movie, and movies have to run an hour and a half or so. “People Like Us” isn’t written for people like us; it’s written for aliens or cave dwellers who have never seen a movie.

So cue lots of bizarre romantic scenes with this strange new couple sharing secrets and having laughs. Sam gradually becomes a father figure to the boy, a creation of the Smart-Talking Troubled Youth Macro No. 4 on Final Draft software.

The considerable talents of Banks make the movie bearable as we wait for the screenwriters (Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Jody Lambert, the first two associated with middling TV shows like “Alias”) and director (Kurtzman) to catch up to the audience. The implied incest behind the icky flirting isn’t even the most inbred thing about the movie; each of the four principal characters sounds the same (like a smart-assed but not particularly funny cynic). Toward the end of the movie, when we finally hear the dead dad’s much-trumpeted six rules for living, one rule is, “Whatever you think is important, isn’t; whatever you think isn’t important, is.” It’s obvious that the writers think this film is important.