Pun Salad

Truth be told, this is an OK comedy, raunchy division. Not great, not awful. The star, Adam Devine is an Iowa boy, like me and Neal Stephenson. So we'll give him a pass, and hope he works on better projects in the future.

He plays Phil, who has a sweet San Francisco pad, coupled with a soul-deadening job at an Internet content farm; he and his co-workers have the non-stop everyday task of composing clickbait listicles. ("Ten Cats That Look Like Ryan Gosling") He's a friendless loner, shies away from any sort of risk-taking, dedicated to the phone he looks at incessantly. (Like all San Franciscans, the movie claims.)

Two things happen: he meets the lovely Cate, proprietor of a bike shop. It's a "meet cute", involving destruction of said phone. So he needs a new one, he gets one from Wanda Sykes, and it has one of those new-fangled AI assistants, named "Jexi".

It turns out that Phil's copy of Jexi is all too advanced, complete with character flaws. For one, she's foulmouthed. (The first five times Jexi deadpans an f-bomb, it's pretty funny. The next few hundred times… maybe not so much.) Jexi dedicates all her CPU cycles to improving Phil's life. And guess what, it works!

It works all too well: as Phil and Cate hit it off, Jexi feels ignored and gets jealous. And dedicates herself now to ruining Phil's new life.

I stayed awake. These days, that's pretty high praise.