She's beautiful; he's a schlub

Long Shot goes for laughs by teaming Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron. It probably will be a hit -- but not with me.

The Long Shot, an improbable romantic comedy starring Charlize Theron (beautiful) and Seth Rogen (schlubby) likely will score with audiences, more for its comedy than its romance. Directed by Jonathan Levine (50/50), the movie plays to the expectation that someone who looks like Theron -- and who does a better job of looking like Theron than Theron herself? -- possibly could fall for someone who looks like Rogen, who, as far as we know, never has been mistaken for Bradley Cooper.

To make the movie even more ludicrous, Theron portrays a Secretary of State with presidential ambitions and Rogen has been hired to play a rogue journalist who has little respect for anything that might be described as the "official" world. It's reasonable to wonder how Rogen's Fred Flarsky would even know someone such as Theron's Charlotte Field.

We quickly learn that the relationship traces back to Fred's teens. The slightly older Charlotte babysat for Fred, who expressed his fondness for her with an erection that caused his pants to bulge. Evidently, the moment was so important that Fred never forgot it.

When Fred and Charlotte meet as adults -- if that's what the character played by Rogen can be called -- they strike up a relationship. They meet, by the way, at a party at which Boyz II Men makes an appearance. Turns out they're both Boyz II Men fans. What are the odds?

Charlotte is impressed with Fred's candor as a supposedly fearless and funny journalist who works for a Brooklyn newspaper. As luck would have it, Fred is newly unemployed having quit his job when his paper was taken over by a right-wing tycoon.

Field hires Fred as a speechwriter and ... well ... I don't have to tell you that one thing leads to another and an unlikely romance blossoms between the Secretary of State and this slovenly Secretary of Sate. (I know, "sate" isn't a noun, but I couldn't resist.)

The movie plays a bad-taste card early. In his effort to infiltrate a meeting of neo-Nazis, Fred agrees to have a swastika tattooed on his arm. That way, the skinheads will believe he's one of their Jew-hating brethren. Sure.

I suppose all of this could have worked had the screenplay, credited to Dan Sterling and Liz Hannah, found a comic tone that could accommodate both meathead humor and something slightly more sophisticated.

If Long Shot scores with audiences, it may be because Levine's understands that all successful comedies require a couple of major moments that have been engineered to elicit the always desirable Big Laugh.

At one point, Field's advisors (June Diane Raphael), tries to embarrass Fred, who has been told that he should shed his neo-hippie attire and find a suit he can wear to one of Field's appearances at an international conference. They find him a suit that would look out-of-place at a Scandinavian folk festival, but the joke is undermined by a question: Would Fred really be stupid enough to wear this ridiculous outfit?

If you're going to hire Rogen, it's probably fitting to work masturbation into the story and if you can find a way to include a masturbation joke with ejaculate, you've struck gold. Levine does both. I'll say no more.

If you've seen any Rogen performance, you already know that he'll punctuate the proceedings with wisecracks, some of them clever. Theron gives a reasonably adept comic performance as her character is put in the position of having to defend Fred against those who believe that he's too much the irredeemable slob to qualify as a romantic partner for someone who aspires to the nation's highest office, currently held by a self-involved fool played by Bob Odenkirk.

The supporting cast includes Alexander Skarsgard as the Canadian Prime Minister, a suave, good-looking fellow who's supposed to make an ideal companion for Charlotte, aside from his creepy pretensions and a fingernails-on-blackboard laugh. O'Shea Jackson Jr. shows up as one of Fred's buddies, a guy who's successful in business. Andy Serkis, looking strange as ever, plays the media mogul who's trying to gobble up the entire media world.

I know from the reaction of a preview audience that enough folks will find Long Shot hilarious to make it into a small hit. To wit: There's even a scene in which the Secretary of State, uncharacteristically high on drugs, must deal with a national security crisis.

But I'm not casting my vote for a comedy that, like a long-winded political speech, goes on for two hours, and which too often seems more interested in packaging gags than in taking on political hypocrisy or, heaven forbid, something audiences truly hold sacred: the romantic comedy. Rather than challenging the form, the movie can't resist capitulating to it.

Schumer and Hawn stumble in the jungle

Formula tramples fun in this early summer comedy.

It has been 15 years since Goldie Hawn appeared in a movie. Maybe she should have waited a bit longer instead of hitching her star to Snatched, a comedy that teams her with Amy Schumer. Hawn, who has made her share of successful comedies, this time appears in a formula job that elevates raunch in the service of yuks that are few and far between -- at least for me.

Widely regarded as one of the funnier comics on the planet, Schumer received lots of praise for Trainwreck, a 2015 comedy that she wrote and which Judd Apatow directed. But Schumer didn't write Snatched. That job fell to Katie Dippold, whose credits include the recent Ghostbusters movie (not good) and The Heat (better).

Here, Dippold, with a forgettable assist from director Jonathan Levine (The Night Before and Warm Bodies), provides a platform to showcase Schumer's willingness to go raunchy in ways that become a form of feminist assertion -- and, at least in the past, have hit paydirt.

Schumer plays Emily, a young woman who loses both her job and her boyfriend in the movie's opening scenes. To make matters worse, Emily is stuck with two tickets to Ecuador, a country she planned to visit with the boyfriend who decided he could do better.

Unable to persuade any friend to accompany her to Ecuador, Emily coerces her reluctant mother (Hawn) into joining her for an adventure. Emily also has a brother (Ike Barinholtz), an emotionally hampered adult who still lives with his mother and who's unable to leave the house. Why? Because he's the comedy's demonstrably (and annoyingly) neurotic character -- as opposed to Emily, a character defined by her self-absorption.

Once in Ecuador, Emily is lured into a trap that results in mother and daughter being kidnapped. During the course of their prolonged escape, Emily manages to put a spear through someone's throat for what she insists should be seen as an "accidental murder." She also must rid herself of a colossally sized tape worm that's extracted from her mouth by a couple of locals who lure the bug from her by dangling a hunk of meat in front of Emily's face, perhaps the movie's biggest laugh.

Wanda Sykes and Joan Cusack appear in roles that could have added welcome strangeness had they been around more. Their rough-and-ready characters eventually try to rescue Emily and her Mom.

Fairness compels me to tell you that a preview audience reacted more favorably to the movie than I did, but for me, the movie's few random chuckles were matched by a significantly larger number of scowls as I watched two talented women sweat their way through the Amazon.

Zombies need love, too

Warm Bodies is formulaic in some ways and totally fresh in others.

You know this drill. Zombie meets girl. Zombie loses girl. Zombie ...

OK, maybe you haven't seen this scenario played out with a zombie, but you've followed similar patterns in a zillion other love-struck rom-coms.

Warm Bodies -- which just as well could have been called I Ate Her Boyfriend's Brains -- earns extra credit for embracing romantic cliches while avoiding a variety of others.

This mostly sweet-tempered movie also does a reasonably good job of delivering a "can't-we-all-get-along" message. In this case, "we" refers to zombies and humans living in a post-apocalyptic world of deprivation and scarcity.

The zombies in Warm Bodies' hang out at the airport of the unnamed city where the action takes place. They shuffle aimlessly through empty, litter-strew corridors, looking as bereft as travelers who've been told all flights have been cancelled.

When the zombies venture away from the airport, it's to feed on small parties of sustance-seeking humans.

The story centers on a zombie named "R," played by Nicholas Hoult, and a young woman named Julia, portrayed by Teresa Palmer. A lonely "R" rescues Julia after a feeding raid in which he eats her boyfriend's brain, apparently the best part of any human, although a couple of hours of watching Congress on C-SPAN might convince you otherwise.

Consuming the brains of others keeps zombies going, while allowing these otherwise memory-deprived creatures to experience the memories of the person on whom they've dined, a form, one supposes, of mental indigestion.

Most of the movie focuses on the relationship between R and Julia. Her life is complicated by the fact that her father (a staunch John Malkovich) leads the surviving humans in their battle against zombies. He hates zombies.

Because zombies have difficulty speaking, Hoult -- blood-stained, pallid and wearing a tattered hoodie -- generates pathos by playing a good deal of the movie as a nearly mute creature struggling to express himself. We do, however, hear R's thoughts, which are fluently spoken and mildly amusing. They also serve as the movie's voice-over narration.

Writer/director Jonathan Levine, working from a novel by Isaac Marion, seems more interested in offbeat romance than in dotting every "i" and crossing every "t," and he relies on the movie's well-executed production design to convey a feeling of post-apocalyptic rot.

Hoult and Palmer turn the movie into a pleasing fable about the way love can revive the dead, presuming you're willing to view death (as the movie does) in metaphoric terms.

Levine (The Wackness and 50/50) doesn't do nearly as well in trying to fulfill other genre obligations, say, horror. Skeletal creatures called Bonies become the major threat to both humans and zombies. Bonies have moved well beyond redemption. All that's left of them are bones and ravenous appetites.

Sprinkled with mild humor -- some of it from one of R's fellow zombies (Rob Corddry) -- Warm Bodies sometimes looks more serious than it actually is, but the movie's better than you'd expect for a zombie-human teen romance.

"Zombie-human teen romance? No, I can't believe I just wrote that, either.