Last year, Kumail Nanjiani starred in a buddy comedy in which his timid character was caught in the crossfire of a battle between cops and criminals, attempting to stop bad guys while keeping himself safe. Now he’s doing pretty much the same thing in The Lovebirds, which trades his Stuber co-star Dave Bautista for Insecure’s Issa Rae and follows the same “unadventurous couple enters seedy underworld” template that propelled previous comedy hits Date Night and Game Night. Nanjiani and Rae are both very funny in work that showcases their unique personalities, but aside from a couple of stand-up-style riffs on everyday absurdities from Nanjiani’s Jibran, the main characters in The Lovebirds are generic sitcom-style nobodies.
The movie opens by showing the idyllic first date between Jibran and Leilani (Rae), who were so smitten with each other that they couldn’t bear to part over the course of a night and the following day together. Cut to four years later, and they’re getting into a heated argument over whether they would be good competitors on The Amazing Race and are barely able to motivate themselves to leave the house to go to a friend’s dinner party. On the way to that party, they finally decide to break up, right before a man on a bicycle slams into their car, breaking the windshield. As they get out of the car to offer help, another man rushes up, claims to be a police officer and commandeers their car to chase down the bicyclist.
At first Jibran and Leilani are excited to be helping this badass cop (Paul Sparks) chase down a suspect, but when he catches up to the bicyclist and shoots him before running over him several times, it becomes clear that this is not an officially sanctioned police action. Left standing over a dead body next to their own car in full view of witnesses and with the actual cops on the way, the couple make the split-second decision to run away.
Two people of color fleeing the scene of a crime that left a white man dead could be the set-up for a very different kind of movie (it’s not that far from the plot of last year’s stylish drama Queen & Slim), but the filmmakers behind The Lovebirds mostly downplay the potentially uncomfortable racial implications in favor of much broader, wackier shenanigans. Jibran and Leilani at least acknowledge the likelihood that the cops would be disinclined to believe them thanks to the color of their skin, and the movie makes a joke out of the white hipsters who call in the crime and go out of their way to deny any racist implications to their accusations.
For the most part, though, this is a movie about square middle-class homebodies who are in over their heads. The jokes are mostly about how ill-prepared Jibran and Leilani are to solve a mystery and confront dangerous criminals, although the screenplay by Aaron Abrams and Brendan Gall is pretty sloppy with the construction of the mystery.
That mystery gets resolved in a rushed, anticlimactic fashion toward the end of the short movie (just over 80 minutes before the closing credits), despite a number of ignored loose ends. The movie doesn't need to craft an intricate, complex mystery as long as it’s consistently funny, but given the danger the characters put themselves in, the stakes turn out to be disappointingly low.
There are still some fun set pieces along the way. Anna Camp makes a too-brief appearance as a Southern belle working hard to cover up her politician husband’s indiscretions, and resorting to drastic measures to extract information she thinks Jibran and Leilani have in their possession. More goofy side characters like that would have given The Lovebirds a madcap feel, but instead most of the action involves the main characters running through alleys or sitting in the back seats of ride-share cars. Since Sparks’ mysterious assailant disappears for the entire middle of the movie, there isn’t even an enjoyably nasty villain tracking the couple down.
So, the movie hinges on its stars’ comedic connection, and while Nanjiani and Rae are both likable and funny, they don’t have much chemistry. As a result, it’s hard to invest in the predictable arc of Jibran and Leilani repairing their broken relationship. Director Michael Showalter effectively brought Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon’s sensitive true story to life in The Big Sick, but there’s none of that heartfelt emotion in The Lovebirds’ rote rom-com plotting. Showalter is also a member of influential alt-comedy troupe The State, and The Lovebirds takes a brief detour into the surreal when Jibran and Leilani end up at an Eyes Wide Shut-style sex party, but the movie quickly pulls back from the weirdness and returns to conventional storytelling.
Originally slated for theatrical release before being sold to Netflix, The Lovebirds sometimes feels like a small-scale movie trying too hard to fit the blockbuster mode of its influences -- and coming up short. Nanjiani and Rae could make a great team for a low-key hang-out movie, but in The Lovebirds, they just seem lost.
Starring Kumail Nanjiani, Issa Rae, Paul Sparks, Anna Camp and Kyle Bornheimer, The Lovebirds premieres Friday on Netflix.