“I’m not boring!” single gal Debbie (Joy Bryant) insists to potential love interest Danny (Michael Ealy) early on in this remake of the iconic ’80s romance.
Honestly, though? They both are, a bit — and were in the original, too. Director Steve Pink (“Hot Tub Time Machine”) improves on the 1986 Edward Zwick movie by wisely giving more screen time to less-strait-laced supporting characters.
Kevin Hart lives up to his star-potential buzz with this turn as Danny’s wild-man friend Bernie, and he’s matched by Regina Hall, as Debbie’s roommate Joan, with whom he has a crackling comic — and sexual — chemistry.
I can’t repeat most of their best lines here, as it’s definitely a hard-R movie, but suffice to say they’re both comfortable working blue.
Though relocated from Chicago to Los Angeles, the main plot is the same, revolving around Debbie and Danny, who meet at a bar and fall quickly in lust, then more slowly in love. They hook up, fall back, reunite, move in together — then must embark on the more complicated process of figuring out how, and whether, to forge a real life together.
Meanwhile, Bernie and Joan, who’ve already had a one-night stand at the outset, are engaged in their own courtship of sorts, though it’s a much livelier one. And rightly so — after all, the source material here is David Mamet’s play “Sexual Perversity in Chicago.” Bernie and Joan indulge in plenty of that, including a very funny scene in which Hall’s atop Hart in bed, wearing a chicken mask.
This is not to say Ealy and Bryant are duds — far from it. They have the more thankless role of playing it straight, but both bring a vulnerability and sweetness to their scenes and a facility with the kind of dialogue that made the original groundbreaking for its honesty about relationships. “You will run when I can’t be what you want,” Danny tells her at one point, as he considers whether to quit a job he hates, but that delivers a regular paycheck.
Also, it must be shallowly acknowledged: This is maybe the best-looking pair of lovers on-screen in recent memory, though their love scenes are not quite as explicit as the ones between Demi Moore and Rob Lowe. In one of the exchanges taken basically word for word from the original, Bernie tells Danny his gorgeousness is actually a hindrance with the ladies, as it’s made him lazy. “The best thing that could happen to your face,” he says, “is an industrial accident.”
But all that beauty can’t hold our interest forever, and things do flag a bit in the middle, with Debbie and Danny constantly bickering. Paula Patton appears in a small role as Danny’s toxic ex-girlfriend, camping it up in a way that feels out of sync with the naturalistic tone of the rest of the movie. Bernie spends more time out on the town with Danny, and their bro-banter is less riveting (and more cliché) than when Joan’s around.
Still, this really is an “About Last Night” for our times. I suspect that having a male director and female screenwriter (Leslye Headland, director of “Bachelorette”) helped make the film more of an evenhanded look at gender relations and less “war of the sexes,” though a few tired tropes remain.
With its black and biracial leads and supporting cast of various ethnicities (Adam Rodriguez plays Debbie’s ex, while Joe Lo Truglio is amusing as Danny’s boss) it’s also a more accurate reflection of who we are; the Chicago of the original was uniformly lily-white. And it makes a well-stated case that there’s more than one way to be in a relationship. Bernie and Joan don’t go through the same predictable milestones as Debbie and Danny, but there’s an honesty in their chaotic approach to love and sex. (Exhausted during a marathon session in the bedroom, they play rock-paper-scissors to see who has to do the work of being on top.)
Maybe my favorite thing about this “About Last Night,” though, is that it’s proof romantic comedies don’t have to be so predictable. Headland’s rapid-fire, pop culture-saturated dialogue is much more fun than what passes for acceptable in most “chick flicks,” so here’s hoping this one won’t get relegated to that category. A movie that references “the Lando Calrissian Effect” in dating, after all, is clearly also aiming for the XY crowd.