Last night I watched Jexi, a movie about a lonely, isolated man Phil who relies too heavily on his phone before he breaks it and his replacement is the sadistic mean girl of AI, Jexi. I immediately love this premise; it would have made a tremendous vehicle for Robin Williams or Jim Carrey if it were currently 1997. It's a magical realist comedy about technology gone awry in an era when people increasingly feel observed, trapped and surrounded by social media.
The movie... drops the ball, significantly. It's got plenty of funny moments, and Adam Devine certainly has the presence to pull off the big moments in the movie, but the film's big moments are really small and far between. So I'm going to say what I would have done differently. For starters, I would have infinite budget, and I would have simply NOT allowed the federal government to shut down, inconveniencing my shoot. If it's not clear from my tone, I'm not a filmmaker, an actor, director, producer, screenwriter, or screenplay editor. I know I don't know what I'm doing, I don't understand the real constraints of the media, this isn't my secret blogger's route to a guaranteed Oscar for best midrange comedy. This is just me reconstructing the movie I wanted to see from the movie that was made. It's how I watch movies. Okay. Here we go.
The movie starts with a montage from Phil's life. His parents give him phones to distract him while they fight, and after three of these the montage changes format to Phil's current life, walking through a San Francisco that's almost completely unobserved as people stare at their phones. Okay, STOP. I need to interject: Jexi, you know you're a movie, right? The preachy tone won't sell to someone who paid to see a silly comedy about a saucy smartphone who says swears. And when your star is Adam Devine, you should definitely avoid preachy: the man has resting Youth Pastor Face.
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| Doesn't he look like the studio has guy whose only job is to wrestle away Adam's acoustic guitar? |
Phil works in an unsatisfying job writing listicles with Ron Funches and Charlene Yi, but he confesses to them that his real passion, the thing he went to school for, his dream job, is journalism. Probably could have revealed that during those two montages you showed us at the beginning of this movie, Jexi. Say... journalism subplot, in San Francisco? You know what movie just did that really, really well? Venom. Yeah, the reboot of the 90s antihero alien goo comic book that eats human faces has a pretty well-grounded journalism B-story, and if you didn't want to invite comparisons, Jexi, you probably shouldn't have shot in the exact same apartment. See, in Venom, protagonist Eddie Brock has a story he's chasing. Between the bits where's he's growing goo-knives or playing human corpse Jenga, Eddie Brock has observed troubling things and needs to tell the world.
Meanwhile, in Jexi, Phil has never noticed anything in his life and you start to get the impression that the both Phil and the script don't actually know what a journalist does. Phil gets to become a journalist when someone gets injured, but it's not clear why Phil gets the job, because he's done nothing to earn it and the boss that gives it to him openly hates him. Unsure of what to do now that they've given him his dream, the script has a perfunctory celebration scene that takes place in a supremely generic office.
A few minutes later, Phil and romantic subplot Cate are sneaking into a music venue to see Kid Cudi, and when they're cornered by security, Phil, thinking quickly, says that he's Kid Cudi's accountant. Movie, you just made this guy a journalist. That was literally the previous scene. Just have him claim to be a reporter. Hey, isn't Music Journalist a thing? Aren't there journalists who report on local entertainment? Anyway, in the next scene he's fired from Journalisming. The end!!! I GUESS!
Phil approached journalism like a someone who lied to their guidance counselor in 10th grade, and then just kept sticking with the lie because it was easier than investigating the growing hole at the center of his soul. If you're wondering why I've been pulling on this thread so hard, here's why: investigating his spiritual emptiness should have been the point of this movie.
Early in the film, Phil lies about how satisfying is life is, in that vacuous style that makes social media so emotionally damaging. But his dream is part of that lie. Just like he doesn't actually find living in San Francisco emotionally satisfying, he doesn't want to be a journalist, he just told himself that was part of the life he wanted to make. Similarly, the romantic subplot of the movie involves him "falling in love" with the first girl he sees when he drops his phone.
I have more to say about this movie, because I haven't even begun talking about the sassy AI. I need to take a break, though, because this essay is longer than the movie.
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