Always Be My Maybe (2019)

Alie Wong is a great standup comedienne. Randall Park is a hilarious actor. Keanu Reeves is Keanu Reeves.

Wong and Park chose a bog-standard RomCom storyline for their movie, which should have allowed their respective comedy flavors to soak every scene in hilarity without having to worry about distracting plot elements. I should have been in stitches the entire time.
Somehow that’s not what happened here.

Sasha (Wong) and Marcus (Park) were thick-as-thieves childhood friends from LA, but at 18 grew apart due to a tragedy that both of them handled very poorly. Sixteen years later, Sasha has gone on to become a celebrity chef with a rapidly growing collection of marquee restaurants across the country, while Marcus hasn’t gone anywhere or done anything with his life. A by-chance run-in reconnected the two estranged friends and got the story rolling.
It went as all RomComs go: things went well, a contrived plot device caused friction, and then all was happy and settled before the final credits.

Unfortunately for everyone watching, the contrived plot device here was a stunning display of emotional immaturity from both main characters. Marcus seemed to think it was cool to be a loser and okay to shit on Sasha’s customer base, pointing out that rich people pay too much money for “fancy” food, while Sasha lashed out repeatedly, constantly stating that she had to do everything alone her entire life with no support from anyone, despite the fact that the opening of the movie showed very clearly that Sasha was closer to Marcus’ mom than her own mother.

While the two leads are comedians by trade, there was not nearly enough comedy in the script to balance out the festering emotional wound that kept getting picked at. Instead of either character being able to acknowledge the tragedy of years gone by and move on from it, they both continued to use it as a crutch for their crappy behavior towards each other.

The saving grace of this movie took place at a restaurant in LA that lampooned fancy meals, with dishes like “the flavor of Caesar salad” and “seaweed reduction in water” while Keanu Reeves, who played himself, waxed poetic about insane nothings.

Speaking of Reeves: in this movie, he was an absolute asshole, which was really weird. Everything I’ve ever read about him on the internet suggests he’s a super sweet guy, and all of his character roles have been ‘chaotic neutral’ or better, though usually very flat. Had Reeves parodied himself as “Leanu Steeves,” this would have been a complete non-issue and I wouldn’t even have typed up this paragraph, but for him to play “himself” and be a dick felt misplaced and weird.

I’d also like to point out that ‘fiction’ movies that aggressively point out regular pop culture always feel weirdly disconnected from their own internal reality (Worst offender: “Bay Watch” (2017)). Surely in a world that has Reeves commenting on his role as John Wick also has Wong’s “Baby Cobra” (2016) on Netflix, or Park’s “The Interview” (2014) stolen and leaked to the world, yet Wong and Park weren’t recognized for who they really were.

Obviously, being a RomCom, everything was solved and Sasha and Marcus ended up together… after Sasha did all the work. At no point did I feel that Marcus deserved the ending he got – while he did have some emotional growth, it was definitely ‘too little, too late’ to reasonably justify his man-childness getting yet another chance with the clearly-adult Sasha.

Final complaint: the title doesn’t make sense. In every movie I can think of, the title is either a character’s name (“Mulan”), a description of the plot (“Toy Story”), an item/event from the movie (“Transformers” or “13 Days”), or a line from the movie (“Stardust”).
At no point during “Always be my Maybe” did Sasha or Marcus say that to each other. Nor, as the title might suggest, did they have a long-term on-again/off-again relationship, as this movie effectively took place over the course of maybe 14 days.

This flick was okay. Watch it on an airplane because you like RomComs and are very bored.
Do not watch this because you like Wong or Park, as their respective forms of comedy were absolutely not present. This could have starred Reese Witherspoon and John Travolta for the same nuance and humor.