'Long Shot' Comes Out Ahead

Note: the hats are not hiding head wounds

While Long Shot does open with a scene in which journalist Fred Flarsky (Seth Rogen) suffers a blow to his head (and, well, his entire body), that accident does not lead to some kind of head trauma-created alternative reality in which women like the beautiful and powerful secretary of state Charlotte Field (Charlize Theron) find him irresistible; I guess that conceit is reserved for the ladies. Instead, we're to accept this is a romance based in reality.

And that's fine! Beautiful people fall in love with shlubby people all the time! I just wish when it came to Hollywood, that scenario wasn't relegated to the realm of fantasy for one of the sexes.

Following that slapstick-filled opening, the alternative weekly Brooklyn paper Fred Flarsky writes for is bought by a right wing media conglomerate owned by the Roger Ailes/Rupert Murdoch-esque Parker Wembley (a heavily made up Andy Serkis). The very liberal Flarsky quits in disgust. His best friend Lance (O'Shea Jackson, Jr.) attempts to cheer him up with a day of debauchery, and because Lance is rich (though it's never made clear exactly what he does), the night ends at a fancy benefit featuring Boys II Men, and a guest list that includes Secretary of State Charlotte Field.

Flarksy and Field have a bit of history. When he was 13, she was his 16-year-old babysitter, and he made his crush on her embarrassingly obvious. While he's never forgotten her, he's kind of hoping she's forgotten him, or at least, the more embarrassing parts. But she does recognize him, and their conversation helps her remember the idealist she used to be in high school.

Field is a skilled--and youngest ever--Secretary of State to an imbecilic president (Bob Odenkirk, nailing it) who seems to have been elected simply because he played the POTUS on a popular television show; (it's not unheard of!). She's set her sights on succeeding him, and needs to improve her public image a bit to boost her numbers. This means hiring an advisor (Lisa Kudrow, in a killer cameo), to help her improve things like her wave, and punching up her speeches with humor.

Enter newly-unemployed Fred Flarsky. Field's chief of staff (June Diane Raphael, in what would normally be a villainous role, but is thankfully more nuanced), is steadfastly against the hiring, but Field is adamant. So before Flarsky can even change out of his painfully ugly neon windbreaker, he's jet-setting around the world as Field's new speech writer.

Flarsky spends as much time as he can getting to know Secretary Field, in between her 10 minute, eyes-wide-open power naps, and during the seven minutes she may have between phone calls, and Rogen and Theron have a believable chemistry together. For the most part. When they end up having sex that results in simultaneous orgasms after 20 seconds of intercourse, I kept waiting for Secretary Field to roll over, laugh and say, "Ha ha, but seriously, get back here and help me finish."

And certainly, Rogen and Theron do look like an unlikely pair. Rogen is playing a pretty standard Seth Rogen man-child character, but his pairing with Theron as both his straight man and a comedic partner, helps make him more likeable than he has been in years. Their escapade taking molly at a Paris nighclub is funny. But Theron's scene handling a national crisis while still high is funnier than anything else in the admittedly pretty funny movie.

You can't have a romantic comedy with roadblocks, which include the belief Field's staff has that voters won't accept someone like her paired up with someone like him. They're convinced they'd be more accepting of a romance between her and the handsome but milquetoast Prime Minister of Canada (Alexander Skarsgård, hilariously playing against type).

But it's a potential scandal with Flarsky at the center that is set up as the true roadblock forcing Field to choose between love and career. While the screenplay (by Dan Sterling and Liz Hannah) does acknowledge just how difficult and unfair Field's being a woman has made her rise to power, it also exists in a world where Donald Trump as president doesn't, and never did, exist. In some ways this is problematic, as we're all too painfully aware that scandals aren't enough to convincingly bring down a presidential candidate any more, so why would they even worry about it?

But on the other hand, it also broadens the romantic fantasy. Sure, it's nice to imagine a happy ending between a seemingly mismatched couple. But isn't it even nicer to imagine a world where the last three years never even happened?