Permeated with tropes, heaped with implausibility, way high into the night sky, and terrorized by a lack of understanding for romance, Baggage Claim finds its inevitable course down into the garbage releases of Hollywood’s September.
“What’s your number?” The dialogue is uncannily simplistic. The overbearing five-times-married mom (Lewis), that a-little-too-friendly next door neighbor, the younger sister (London) getting engaged and the scramble to find all of Montana’s exes – through 80 minutes – alas, to find a perfect love match for dinner could not drive you any closer to leaving.
Paula Patton plays Montana Moore (30). She’s a flight attendant who has enlisted the help of her fellow airline industry workers to ambush her former flames inflight. They concoct a nutty plan to track the flight itineraries of all Montana’s ex-boyfriends and then send her scurrying past TSA checkpoints in an effort to run into these prior rejects in the hope that they have become marriage worthy.
This somewhat higgledy-piggledy goal to find a date for a rehearsal dinner is the whole premise of this film.
Why? Because going stag to her younger sister’s pre-wedding ceremony would be too tall an order for young Montana.
A parade of black men – Taye Diggs, Djimon Hounsou, Boris Kodjoe, and Neverson aka Trey Songz – sweep in and out of Montana’s narrative, but to no avail.
Devoid of a plot, lacking in creativity and capping its audiences with several doses of prophetic omniscience, predicting who Montana ended up with was relatively a drill for a two-year old – making the whole 80 minutes of film rather an infantile academic exercise.
Is it more important for a rom-com to be funny? Or is it more important for it to be amply romantic?
A romantic comedy, the one I would remember, plays both sides of this paradigm with something approaching grace, pivoting on a dime, and using humor to boost the central characters, making the serious elements all the more insightful.
If you’re looking for giggles, logic, realism, or oh well, romance, you have very little chance of finding any of that here in Baggage Claim.
That’s the dime flipped high into the air, the need for comedy on one side, the yearning for romance on the other, spinning round and round until you decide to boot it down the valley, down into that river where it dives deep to the bottom never to be seen again.
Director: David E. Talbert
Writer: David E. Talbert (screenplay)
Stars: Paula Patton, Taye Diggs, Jill Scott
Another one of those. Baggage Claim or Garbage Claim?
Honestly I would have a better movie if I just had a Lumiere shot. Or rather, just set the camera out there for 80 minutes, Frederick Wiseman style, and still my movie will be better than this thing here called Baggage Claim.
Mr. Talbert is a stage play guy, he’s obviously ventured out of his comfort zone.
It really doesn’t take much to entertain a bunch of people who want to be entertained. But when you fail at it, it’s just… hrrrsh! Paula Patton is my girl and she can do better.
This was a book at first? What book? Who read it?
Don’t judge a book by the cover. I think I got this one right… I thought it was a bad movie from the get go. Baggage Claim? What kind of title it that anyways?
A watchable, yet a sub-par film.