The Words: Will It Get You Laid?

The Words. I've been staring at those two words sitting in this text document now for the last half hour and I genuinely have no words for how bad, bad, bad, this film was.

First up, a little background info … The Words is three stories intertwined told from the perspective of three writers (Jeremy Irons, Dennis Quaid, and Bradley Cooper). Quaid narrates the story of Cooper who plays struggling young author Rory Jansen caught up in mounting pressure from his family to finally "make" something of himself after his previously failed attempts at becoming a published author.

While on his honeymoon in Paris his wife purchases a briefcase as a present that unbeknownst to him holds a previously unpublished manuscript. Upon discovery he reads the story and is immediately engrossed in the tale. Cooper is then faced with the moral dilemma - does he retype it and pass it off as his own attempting to get it published? Or does he leave the story as is and continue pushing his work despite rejection letter after rejection letter.

Cooper then does the unthinkable and types out verbatim the book not changing so much as a word or comma. The book becomes an immediate best-seller and suddenly Cooper becomes a media darling touted as one of the greats of his generation.

He is then approached in a park by Irons who identifies Cooper, and then pitches him on his next book - a young writer who loses a story he wrote in post war Paris only to find out it has been published years later and passed off as someone else's. Cooper, obviously, stops dead in his tracks and hears the man's story and everything takes off from there.

I can't say too much without giving it away (and spoilers are NEVER my thing), but bottom line - this movie tries way too hard. Irons, and Barnes (young Irons) were both enchanting but there was something so vacant and unlikeable about Cooper. I can't remember ever seeing someone so "hollow" on screen. One would think considering it's a story about plagiarism that this would be an asset, but instead it made me not want to root for him. He was this vacant shell that despite his piercing blue eyes kept making me want to walk out of the theater.

Everything about this film from the overly mellow dramatic soundtrack to the golden tones of the flashback was in itself plagiarized by every other film before it. I could literally hear the director at one point go, and this is the moment where the audience goes AH-HA!!!

It attempted to be cerebral but landed somewhere along the lines of in your face and why should I even care?

Cliche at its best the film overall is at its worst. If you take your date to this film not only will she not have sex with you after seeing it, she will verbally assault you afterwards with how bad it is. (Unless verbal sadism is part of your foreplay then by all means.)

Bottom line: Do. Not. Take. Your. Date. To. See. This. Movie. If. You. Want. To. Remain. In. A. Relationship.

That is all.