Canada, United States · 2019
1h 24m
Director Jon Lucas, Scott Moore
Starring Adam DeVine, Alexandra Shipp, Rose Byrne, Ron Funches
Genre Comedy
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Phil's new phone comes with an unexpected feature, Jexi...an A.I. determined to keep him all to herself in a comedy about what can happen when you love your phone more than all else.
Surely, bland cultural insights can’t defeat a film whose main attraction is the promise of stupid, raunchy fun? Reader, Jexi fails even at that, as it awkwardly struggles across its slim running time to land a single one of its existentially painful, seemingly bot-generated jokes.
What we’re left with is a benign, artless, nothing of a movie that feels cobbled together with the same app-driven, gig-economy mentality that Phil is trying to disavow. Entire characters are ordered à la carte and forgotten about as soon as they leave our sight, as “Jexi” races across its story with the listlessness of someone blankly scrolling through their social media feeds.
Although this wasteful effort from the “Bad Moms” team is uninspired in almost every regard, it does advance cinema in a single way: writers-directors Jon Lucas and Scott Moore have figured out how to modernize one of the most traditional and apparently still essential Hollywood tropes: the Crazy Bitch.
The New York Times by Glenn Kenny
While its mode of argumentation gets weaker as the standard-issue boy-meets-girl-meets-carpe-diem plot progresses, the appealing cast and brisk running time help “Jexi” not wear out its welcome.
It would be easier to buy Jexi’s more intentional absurdities if its reality wasn’t so elastic, stretching to accommodate poorly staged large-scale slapstick.
The Hollywood Reporter by John DeFore
Nearly everything misfires here — bizarrely so, since we can see where the laughs should come, how they would work, and how a more competent movie would get from A to Z. (To be fair, some jokes do land, just not as satisfyingly as you'd hope.)
Los Angeles Times by Kimber Myers
Jexi is such a dumb, lazy film that it might have even the most ardent cinephile reaching for their device, ready to defend their defection to the dark side when faced with this clunker of a comedy.
RogerEbert.com by Monica Castillo
Although the title is confounding and perhaps the movie’s worst misstep, it’s Byrne’s digitized and stilted delivery that earns the biggest laughs.
Lucas and Moore write some whiplash funny lines, and since the film is just a throwaway, you can enjoy it on a trivial synthetic revenge-of-the-nerd level.
Devine? Still an acquired taste that defies acquisition.
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