People Like Us

Is Chris Pine’s career moving forward or backward? I can’t really tell, but since his debut as Star Trek’s Captain Kirk and starring alongside Denzel in Unstoppable, the roles have been lower profile. This is fine if it’s intentional. If not, then too bad. People Like Us has Pine coming to town for his father’s funeral when he discovers that his unsympathetic dad had a daughter with a woman who wasn’t Pine’s mother. Elizabeth Banks plays the daughter, who is similarly not fond of the deceased father. But when Pine’s character loses his courage to reveal the truth to his sister, he decides to get to know her and her son.

The script uses a lot of time building the relationship between Banks and Pine while hardly advancing the story otherwise. After a handful of awkward scenes where he stalks her trying to find the courage to introduce himself, the audience is gifted with a number of pseudo-dates, which make it look like the two are about to make-out Luke and Leia Star Wars style. But give Pine credit, he does well balancing his performance in these instances. His character isn’t a creep and the audience never gets that impression from him.

So the biggest issue comes from the fact that the movie is slow and almost completely dialogue driven. It’s not like there needs to be a car chase or something, but at times it’s difficult to remember why the audience is supposed to care about these people. Then, just when you get interested, there is the standard fallout between the two leads that is more dramatic than it needs to be until it meets an unnatural conclusion. There isn’t a whole lot to complain about acting wise, it’s just the script that could use some tweaking.

Each film earns either zero, a half or a full arrow in five categories. The categories are Acting, Writing/Directing, Emotion, Innovation and Overall Impression. The arrows are added up to equal the full score.