If someone undergoes a mid-life crisis at their fifties, what is it called when they are in their thirties? Maybe it’s just never growing up. “Adult Best Friends” gets funny by showing the friction between two best friends as one grows up and falls in love while the other remains stuck. Acting as the movie’s screenwriters and stars, Katie Corwin and Delaney Buffett create a believable friendship for their characters (also named Katie and Delaney) and write some good dialogue about why people might or might not get married. But something doesn’t click instead of being hilarious, the film is mostly boring.
Katie and Delaney have been friends since meeting at a sleepover when they were 12. So when John (Mason Gooding), who is so good to her, proposes to Katie, she finds it difficult to share with her friend. Meanwhile, Delaney who has never liked any of Katie’s boyfriends continues to party hard, sleep with whomever she wants, and refuse to grow up or settle down. Complications arise when Katie invites her up for a BFFs-only weekend trip to their childhood beach town to break the news. Of course chance encounters from their past happen; of course strange people interfere with everything they’re trying to do; of course Katie and Delaney break up and make up again. Of course.
“Adult Best Friend” is always trying to be funny, moving from cringeworthy jokes to heartfelt moments to clever one-liners and back again. It throws out a quick line about Benedict Arnold that works. A longer joke about dog crap only makes you recoil. It’s this flip-flopping between amusing and flat-out boring that defines the movie. Unfortunately, the boring wins out, whatever smart things it has to say about being in your thirties are drowned out by the number of gags that don’t land. The filmmaking doesn’t help either. Buffett handles sole directing duties and shoots most scenes in repetitive medium shots two people talking framed exactly the same way each time, like they were all filmed on the same day with no imagination or invention.
Buffett and Corwin do play well off each other, with a natural rapport and prickly antagonism that sells their lifelong friendship. And there’s some strong comic timing among the throwaway characters too, though those roles often feel slighted. Nearly every secondary character has one characteristic (creepy! angry! annoying!) and one joke, which they repeat ad nauseam. Cory Walls as a skeevy vacation renter and Carmen Christopher as a guy obsessed with hiring exotic dancers are particularly grating, their one-note punchlines becoming a drag on the film almost immediately. Zachary Quinto doesn’t get much to work with either as Katie’s angry older brother, nor can Casey Wilson bring much life to Delaney’s benevolent boss, who appears on Zoom for her entire performance but still manages to create a believable character in just a few short scenes.
The premise of “Adult Best Friends” echoes Nicole Holofcener’s 1996 debut “Walking and Talking,” also about two female best friends whose relationship is strained when one gets serious with someone else indeed, much of the movie seems to be going for Holofcener’s kind of comedy and a lot of the ingredients are there: upwardly mobile, neurotic characters; mix of humor and genuine feeling. But it’s just not as funny or as sharp as those movies, nor does it have their eye for detail or texture. In the end, “Adult Best Friends” is pretty middling stuff; Buffett and Corwin should take their obvious screen chemistry and try again with fewer characters and more heart.
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