Jexi Parent Guide

Phil (Adam Devine) is seriously addicted to his phone. He uses it to order food, navigate, and make up stories about his life to impress strangers online. He even scrolls through his apps in the shower. But when Phil bumps into Cate (Alexandra Shipp) and his phone breaks, the replacement he gets comes with a new virtual assistant: Jexi (Rose Byrne). After consenting to the user agreement without reading it, Phil realizes that he’s signed up for a lot more than he expected. Jexi is now bent on “bettering” his life by any means necessary.

I had an apparently mistaken assumption that films in the comedy genre are supposed to be, you know, funny. At least sometimes. Once or twice would have been a blessing. Jexi death-marches you through 84 agonizingly painful minutes of boring jokes, stock characters, and overly detailed sexual innuendo. And don’t get your hopes up for the romance plot either - it came straight out of a can, which stale-dated in the late ‘90s.

The unfortunate thing here is that I don’t hate the cast – I’ve seen them in other projects and I know they’re capable of being at least passingly amusing. But with this script, the funniest thing I saw was Adam Devine getting in a bike accident. What was even funnier was watching a guy trip on the stairs trying to get to his seat in the dark. Admittedly, that’s always funny. He nearly spilled his popcorn. Classic.

Obviously this isn’t a film for kids or teens and I don’t think it’s a film for adults either. Even if you like raunchy comedies, you probably won’t find much to laugh at in this one. There’s near-constant profanity, which the filmmakers seem to have confused for jokes. (Maybe if you just like hearing people swear you’d find this amusing?) But you could save at least ten bucks off the ticket price and just spend the hour and a half on public transit and get the same intense dose of profanity. You could probably get some of the male nudity that way too…

This film has a fundamentally decent message: smart phones are useful and convenient, and most people spend way too much time on them doing things that don’t matter in the slightest. Ironically, I’ve never wished more desperately that I could pull out my phone during a movie, just to get something to read. I would have settled for “Dick and Jane”, to be honest. It’s better written than Jexi’s script.