Having seen the trailer for the Ken Kwapis’ cast-of-a-thousand stars self help book dramatization He’s Just Not That Into You many, many times (I watch a lot of SoapNET, Lifetime and, uh, MSNBC), I felt reasonably certain going in that I knew exactly what kind of film it was going to be: a wacky, light romantic comedy of mating manners, set in an alternate universe in which otherwise cosmopolitan adults can’t figure out how to use MySpace, and in which all normal and abnormal interpersonal neuroses and difficulties with intimacy are transposed into total paralysis over text messaging. I hope that someday soon, someone in Hollywood makes the film that He’s Not That Into You Was advertised as, because that’s sounds like the exact kind of science fiction that I really enjoy. But He’s Not That Into You is definitely not that film. The question is: what the hell is it?

That Into You fails to fit neatly into assumptions bred by its advertising and its genre makes it somewhat more interesting, if only because it forces us to contend with what our expectations actually are when we go to see a romantic comedy, and what it would actually mean to subvert them. Screenwriters Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein seem to be very aware of contemporary romantic comedy conventions, as well as a certain tradition of final inning moral clean-up that dates back to the very earliest examples of the genre produced under the Hayes Code. But they have no interest in depriving a mass audience of the crack hit of cinematic junk food that they were promised by the promos. The film’s ultimate willingness to pander to expectation may make it a disappointment on a critical level, but I’m not sure making the audience conscious of the way their guilty pleasure works before letting them have it is something for which the filmmakers should be reprimanded.

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