Long Shot review – Seth Rogen gets Charlize Theron’s vote
Plenty of laughs ensue when a presidential hopeful is reunited with the teenager – now a speechwriter – whom she once babysat
The New York Times ran an arts section thinkpiece recently, mulling over the reasons romcoms no longer enjoy the traction they once had. Jonathan Levine’s Long Shot arrives as a reasonably witty riposte to such handwringing, and an acknowledgement of some of the issues such pieces have outlined – chiefly that lasting movie love, as with real love, requires hard work.
Until a final-act slackening of narrative control, Long Shot does a sound job of persuading us there might be a world in which a journalist-turned-speechwriter played by Seth Rogen would be a good match for Charlize Theron, the sparkling presidential candidate who also babysat Rogen as a teenager. Residual scepticism will have to be weighed against a consistent rate of laughs.