Late Night

2019 comedy

Rating: 10/20

Plot: An out-of-touch late night talk show host is given one final year before she's replaced. A female joining the all-male writing staff just might be the spark needed to save the show!

The movie doesn't earn its emotional payoffs just like the characters don't really earn what ends up happening to them. This feels a little half constructed, and the characters don't feel fully formed. A lot of the peripheral characters seem to have wandered into this one from another comedy about a similar subject matter and spend the entire movie trying to get a feel for what's going on. The acting's fine, but nobody's required to do all that much. I did like John Lithgow in this one, but he was really more of a prop than anything else.

I really wanted to like Emma Thompson's crabby talk show host character, and early on, the misanthropic bite in her lines is amusing. Thompson's hitting all her marks, but again, the character just isn't very good. There's really not enough of an arc. Thompson's performance is good enough to help the audience realize that she's learned from mistakes, but nothing that comes after those revelations really convinces you that she's really changed.

There's also no real evidence that these people are funny. Jokes or gags on the show or ones volleyed about in the writer's room aren't funny at all. Of course, that's part of the point early on because the show is struggling. But when changes are being made and the show is supposedly picking up momentum, the jokes and gags still aren't funny. It's the same when Thompson's character is doing a stand-up comedy routine. She initially bombs, the club's audience almost absurdly silent. Then, she starts getting some hearty chuckles and eventually some guffaws and a standing ovation, but I couldn't see much difference between the quality of the first part of the act and the rest of it.

Late Night really ticked me off in its final moments with a camera sweep through the writer's room and the studio. It had about as much emotional depth as a commercial for lawn furniture, and I was almost more embarrassed for Mindy Kaling here than I was because of her involvement in The Wrinkle in Time.