Matthew McConaughey used to be a rom-com legend before he was Coop in Interstellar. He made movies with leading ladies like Kate Hudson in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and one of his most underrated rom-com adventures is Failure to Launch. McConaughey plays Tripp, a man in his 30s, who lives with his parents despite being a ladies’ man, and his parents (played by Kathy Bates and Terry Bradshaw) hire Paula (Sarah Jessica Parker) to get him out of their home.
It isn’t the best romantic comedy of all time, but the movie is genuinely funny. But with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 23%, you’d think that it was responsible for the death of someone’s mother. Yes, you have to experience a naked Bradshaw while watching the movie, but it does have an all-star cast. Alongside McConaughey and Parker are Bradley Cooper, Zooey Deschanel, and Justin Bartha as Tripp and Paula’s friends, who also have messy love lives.
The idea is that Paula has to come into Tripp’s life and convince him to move out of his parents’ home because he’s in love. Then, she gets her payday from his parents, happy that their son is out of their house. Things go haywire when real emotions get involved, and there are some really charming moments from McConaughey in it. And who doesn’t love a Cooper role where he’s a side character and just having fun and not being Cooper about it? Failure to Launch is fun and a movie that, if you saw it when it was released, you probably remember fondly.
‘Failure to Launch’ Has Some Solid Jokes
One of the things about movies like Failure to Launch that people forget is that these movies were funny. Deschanel’s Kit is trying to kill a mockingbird the entire film and makes a joke about a book, asking if there’s one to help her learn how to kill the bird that is annoying her. The store employee responds with the Harper Lee novel To Kill a Mockingbird, a book that is decidedly not about killing a bird, and it is still a joke that is funny to this day! Plus this is McConaughey in his very charming romantic-comedy era, so why not revisit the film now that it is streaming?
If you want to see for yourself if Failure to Launch deserves that RT rating, you can stream the film on Paramount+ in July.