Review: Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Penned by star Jason Segel, best known for his role on How I Met Your Mother, produced by Knocked Up's Judd Apatow, and starring TV sweetheart Kristin Bell, Forgetting Sarah Marshall definitely has the comic man power needed to generate laughs in a market laden with cookie-cutter romance comedies.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall, is, thankfully, not one of them.

The premise: Girl Dumps Boy. Boy wallows in self-pity. Boy goes to Hawaii, where he happens to be staying at the same hotel as the Girl and her new, unbathed boyfriend. Though contrived, the concept opens the movie up for tons of awkward situations and drunken confessions. A movie that would, at best, strike a balance between gross-out humor and lighthearted wit.

And that's exactly what it did.

The movie starts out rocky, with the laughs being forced as we painfully watch the lackluster break up of Sarah (Bell), the star of a a CSI-like TV show, and her less-than-stellar boyfriend Peter (Segel). Sarah spouts uncreative puns as the black light shines off her glossy blonde hair, while Peter composes the show's "musical" score, though he secretly longs to develop a rock opera based on Dracula.

The first half hour of the movie was enough to make anyone with high morals walk out, as the story followed Peter's truly sad and hormonal-driven breakup behavior. When Peter finally gets to Hawaii, Forgetting Sarah Marshall finally starts to shape into a substantial movie. But Hawaii is not without its problems- it turns out Sarah is staying at the same hotel with her new beau, Aldous Snow, a British pop singer with a some sort of weird pelvis-thrusting condition.

Peter, of course, is thrown for a loop, but he gets some much-needed, if not well thought out, advice from his step-brother Brian (Bill Hader) via webcam and some quirky island folks like Chuck, the surf instructor with a case of short-term memory loss (Paul Rudd). But it's not until he starts seeing front desk worker Rachel (Mila Kunis), that Peter starts to actually remember why he's there in the first place.

Despite the immense lack of chemistry between Segel and Kunis, their relationship works because it is not the forefront of the story. Segel plays Peter with a self-assuredness that Segel himself is completely oblivious to, allowing him to shine in even the most impossible situations, such as a chance meeting with Aldous while surfing, and a subplot involving a gay-looking Christian fellow who is unable to satisfy his new wife.

For me, the biggest comic relief came in the form of Aldous, who epitomized every charicature of a British rock star with his egocentric and sex-obsessed musings, invoking the boy-band alter ego of Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow. And like Sparrow, he was right most of the time, even if he was being a self-absorbed ass.

Even though at moments Forgetting Sarah Marshall seems ridiculous, we call all relate to Peter's plight, his awkwardness, his fumblings, and his revelations. The truth is, this movie is believable at heart, and we all know how difficult it can be to forget the Sarah Marshalls in our lives.