By Jason Osiason
Everybody Wants to Fck Me* has a killer premise, which makes it all the more frustrating to watch the movie waste it. Adam, played by Taron Egerton, is the kind of guy who brings a paperback to a bar hoping someone will ask what he’s reading. Tote bag, all the right opinions, calls himself a nice guy. He knows exactly what women want to hear and has built an entire personality around saying it. He sleeps with them, loses interest, moves on. Then he pulls the same routine on Sofia, played by Jessica Henwick, who turns out to be the wrong woman to mess with. Suddenly every woman in London wants him, and what sounds like his dream becomes an increasingly horrifying reality. I love that setup. There’s so much you could do with a guy whose entire identity revolves around being desirable, only to discover how awful it is when he has absolutely no control over who desires him.
My biggest problem is that the movie isn’t nearly mean enough. If you’re going to make a satire about men like Adam, you have to be willing to really put him through it. Let him suffer. Let the audience enjoy watching him suffer, then make them uncomfortable about how much they’re enjoying it. Instead, Jonathan Schey keeps pulling his punches. The situations get more ridiculous, but the comedy rarely gets any darker. A lot of it plays like a sitcom when it should be getting progressively more deranged. Egerton, meanwhile, seems perfectly willing to go there. He’s great at playing a guy who thinks he’s charming even when everyone around him can see how calculated the whole act is. And watching that confidence unravel is easily the funniest thing in the movie. There’s something hilarious about his mounting horror when all his usual tricks start working on people he has no interest in attracting. I kept wishing Schey would just let scenes run longer, let Adam become more desperate, more pathetic, more unbearable to watch. Egerton could absolutely pull it off. The movie never really gives him the chance.
The other problem is that I’ve seen this movie before. It’s called Get Out. Seriously, the similarities become almost distracting. You’ve got the seemingly harmless social environment, the growing suspicion that something is very wrong, the reveal that there’s an actual mechanism behind the nightmare, and eventually the shift into physical horror. It’s practically the same progression. The difference is that Jordan Peele knew how to make every new development feel worse than the last. Even when you started figuring out what was happening, you still had no idea how bad things were going to get. Here, once you understand the premise, you can pretty much see the rest of the movie coming. The surprises aren’t particularly surprising, the horror never gets under your skin, and the satire has made its point long before the movie is finished making it.
It’s a shame because Egerton really is terrific, and I can’t think of many actors better suited to playing this particular kind of asshole. He understands the joke, he’s happy to make himself look ridiculous, and he seems to be having a blast. I just wish the movie around him had that same energy. This could’ve been a genuinely nasty, hilarious takedown of dating culture and the men who’ve figured out how to weaponize being one of the good guys. Instead, it’s a great idea that never gets much further than being a great idea. I hope someone takes another crack at it someday. They should probably cast Egerton again.
