A lot of individually exciting elements – Scarlett Johansson playing a female Don Draper! Channing Tatum as a ‘60s romcom lead! CIA conspiracies vs good ol’ American pluck! – sadly form into a tepid whole in Greg Berlanti’s Fly Me to the Moon, an alt-history romcom farce set at NASA during the Cold War Space Race that is much less fun than that sounds. Unfocused and bloated (a screwball, or screwball-attempting, romance does not need to run at 130 minutes), it charms in bits and pieces but ultimately exhausts itself, getting lost behind silly subplots, lame gags, and much too formulaic storytelling.
Johansson, who also produces here, is easily the highlight of Fly Me to the Moon. She plays Kelly Jones, a New York ad exec with preternatural marketing skills and a sketchy past who is drafted in by NASA to both promote the Apollo 11 moon mission to the politicians and public and shoot a fake moon landing just in case things go wrong. It’s a part Johansson is clearly really enjoying playing, and there’s an enthusiasm to her performance that is pretty irresistible. Tatum, meanwhile, is Cole Davis, the straight-laced director of the launch down in Florida, and though he’s hardly bad in the role, he’s really outshone by his co-star.
This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem – this is by design very much Johansson’s show – but it means the inevitable romance between these two attracted opposites is pretty limp. There’s not much chemistry in this lead couple, either in the performances or the script from Rose Gilroy which jumps between some genuinely snappy dialogue here and there and (more often) shabby cliché, spending way, way too much time establishing the context around events that we’ve seen on the big screen countless times before. The jokes are also consistently pretty feeble, especially a running gag involving an unlucky black cat that absolutely should not have made it to the final cut.
Berlanti is probably best known as the main man behind the CW’s DC shows (Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl etc), and that long time in network TV is immediately aesthetically evident here. Visually, despite some attempts at razzle dazzle, Fly Me to the Moon is just bland, not trying all that hard to immerse us the in the ‘60s setting outside of the period-appropriate needle drops. In fact, the whole thing wouldn’t feel out of place as a super-long episode of the weirdest and, to be fair, the most enjoyable, of the ‘Arrow-verse’ shows, the time-travel-heavy Legends of Tomorrow.
As a film to doze off in front of as a family on a Saturday afternoon, Fly Me to the Moon hits all the right notes of the sort of old-school but high-concept romcom that ‘they just don’t make any more’, but that’s not enough to recommend a trip to the cinema for it. With a bit more fire in its romance or less caution in its comedy (or maybe a full embrace of the never-very-convincing conspiracy stuff involving an underused Woody Harrelson as a thinly written spook), Fly Me to the Moon could have lifted off. Instead, it stays firmly planted at ground level.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 