Reviews

Reddit says embargo lifts Tues, but positive reviews today. Up against two horror movies this weekend.

Review: Scarlett Johansson And Channing Tatum Fire On All Cylinders In A Screwy Space-Race Rom-Com
https://deadline.com/2024/07/fly-me-to-the-moon-review-scarlett-johansson-and-channing-tatum-woody-harrelson-screwy-space-race-romcom-1236002985/

Public burnout with NASA is at the heart of Fly Me to the Moon, which starts, unexpectedly, with a Mad Men-style intro that finds our heroine, Kelly Jones (Johansson), arriving to pitch to an advertising company on Madison Avenue. “Wrong room, we don’t need dictation,” they tell her, saying the quiet part out loud in the sexist spirit of the time. Kelly, however, carries on, with her presentation — selling sports cars to men, in a roomful of men — that is so successful, it seems that she needn’t have bothered with the fake pregnancy bump that she is wearing as a kind of backup plan to elicit sympathy.

They flirt, quite innocently, and Cole, after naively oversharing his attraction to her, is stunned when she turns up at his workplace the next day. Kelly is unfazed and sets about her work like a woman possessed. Flipping the Hudson-Day playbook, Cole is the hustled and Kelly the hustler, which is where the film is at its strongest: Kelly wants to sell the hell out of the upcoming Apollo 11 launch — from wristwatches to underwear and breakfast cereal — but the uptight, nerdy Cole, who clearly wears a vest underneath his stylish, pastel-colored turtlenecks, wants to preserve its integrity. Billy Wilder would have had a lot of fun with this set-up, and there’s a little bit of his 1961 comedy One Two Three here as Cole struggles with this whirlwind that’s now disrupting his ordered life.

But will everyone else get what they want? In its favor, Johansson and Tatum — in perhaps their most weaponized comedic roles since Hail, Caesar! — really do make a great team, which is the main box ticked and will likely be the biggest draw for audiences, especially when it moves from theaters onto Apple TV+. This dazzling partnership doesn’t leave a lasting impression, however. Thanks to its increasingly wayward plotting and thoroughly distracting manipulation of known history in the pursuit of ever more ridiculous laughs, Fly Me to the Moon winds up more screwy than screwball, leaving the door wide open, yet again, for the next crack at that old-school Hollywood chemistry thing.