If you’ve ever seen a Hollywood romantic comedy, you know from the first few minutes of “I Want You Back” where it’s going. In fact, you know from the trailer, perhaps even from the poster. Fortunately, its appealing leads manage to make getting there worth the trip.
Emma (Jenny Slate) and Peter (Charlie Day) are suddenly dumped by Noah (Scott Eastwood) and Anne (Gina Rodriguez), respectively. The crushed dumpees meet-cute in their misery and hatch a plot to go undercover to torpedo each other’s exes’ new relationships (Anne’s seeing theater artiste Logan and Noah’s with pastry queen Ginny) — sort of “Crazy, Stupid, Love” meets “Strangers on a Train.”
Yep, it’s the standard-issue deception-based scheme to shoehorn desperate people back into true love. Both Emma and Peter are stuck in unsatisfactory career situations that were “supposed to be temporary”; you can smell the catharses coming. On the plus side, the exes aren’t monsters. Anne reads as searching and Noah has his reasons for wanting out.
