A college freshman who thinks his long-distance girlfriend is cheating on him sends her the most disgusting Dear Jane letter imaginable (complete with icky and salacious visual aids). But the next morning, he realizes that the truth of the matter has been distorted across the distance, and vows to retrieve the package. Problem: he sent it overnight delivery, and the package has just been picked up. Now he sets off down-river on a wild goose chase to intercept Global Express and save his relationship, with the help of a new friend...
Overnight Delivery is not a movie for everyone. Namely, it is not a movie for those who cannot:
Like the denatured teenybopper ripoff it inspired in Road Trip, Overnight Delivery contains certain plot points that require suspension of disbelief, and in the grand tradition of black comedies of the road (c.f. Planes, Trains and Automobiles), concentrates an implausibly high number of setbacks and disasters into a single forty-eight-hour stretch of dramatic time.
However, with the exception of one or two, none of these scenarios is really all that unenvisionable in and of itself. The unstable (and ungrateful!) personality of Wyatt Trips would have made for a totally unsympathetic and impossible-to-follow character in the hands of anyone else, but Paul Rudd diggs in and shines with such virile passion that the viewer cannot begrudge him the beautiful women who are so enamored of him (even if we would like him to share the wealth a bit... heh, heh! - sorry, that's my immature side coming out).
On the surface, Reese Witherspoon's performance might not seem so memorable by comparison, but Ivy "von Trapp" Miller is complicated in her own, subtle way, and Witherspoon plays it to perfection. Whereas Wyatt is an obvious (but likable) neurotic and repressed post-adolescent whose pitiful attempts at playing the straight man fool no one, Ivy is actually a straight woman attempting to be a rebel - and good at fooling people into thinking she is. So good, in fact, that at the end, when she offers a HIGHLY quirky suggestion for how to solve their latest problem (by avoiding it), one must wonder just how serious she actually is.
To wit, the chemistry between Rudd and Witherspoon is incredible, and the director does an amazing job of making them bounce off one another before they gradually resign themselves to complementing one another.
I have already compared this movie to its descendant, Road Trip, but this is inevitable, since this latter is so much better known. However, the two films, despite the obvious plot similarities, are not alike. Road Trip is about psychologically high school students struggling to adjust to a new setting. They're not, mentally, out of high school, not even at the end of the film. Overnight Delivery is about two young adults who are already well out of high school but struggling to come to terms with the magnitude of that huge step.
When they do, they are free at last: Wyatt from his repression, and Ivy from her fake rebel persona. Well, mostly, anyway. In the end they stay true to themselves AND their thinly-veiled desires.
Overnight Delivery is not a movie for everyone. Namely, it is not a movie for those who cannot:
- get past high school;
- accept that an updated and higher-profile version of something might not be as good as the quirky original;
- appreciate the tenuous art of stylized-realistic suspension of plausibility for black comedic effect.
Like the denatured teenybopper ripoff it inspired in Road Trip, Overnight Delivery contains certain plot points that require suspension of disbelief, and in the grand tradition of black comedies of the road (c.f. Planes, Trains and Automobiles), concentrates an implausibly high number of setbacks and disasters into a single forty-eight-hour stretch of dramatic time.
However, with the exception of one or two, none of these scenarios is really all that unenvisionable in and of itself. The unstable (and ungrateful!) personality of Wyatt Trips would have made for a totally unsympathetic and impossible-to-follow character in the hands of anyone else, but Paul Rudd diggs in and shines with such virile passion that the viewer cannot begrudge him the beautiful women who are so enamored of him (even if we would like him to share the wealth a bit... heh, heh! - sorry, that's my immature side coming out).
On the surface, Reese Witherspoon's performance might not seem so memorable by comparison, but Ivy "von Trapp" Miller is complicated in her own, subtle way, and Witherspoon plays it to perfection. Whereas Wyatt is an obvious (but likable) neurotic and repressed post-adolescent whose pitiful attempts at playing the straight man fool no one, Ivy is actually a straight woman attempting to be a rebel - and good at fooling people into thinking she is. So good, in fact, that at the end, when she offers a HIGHLY quirky suggestion for how to solve their latest problem (by avoiding it), one must wonder just how serious she actually is.
To wit, the chemistry between Rudd and Witherspoon is incredible, and the director does an amazing job of making them bounce off one another before they gradually resign themselves to complementing one another.
I have already compared this movie to its descendant, Road Trip, but this is inevitable, since this latter is so much better known. However, the two films, despite the obvious plot similarities, are not alike. Road Trip is about psychologically high school students struggling to adjust to a new setting. They're not, mentally, out of high school, not even at the end of the film. Overnight Delivery is about two young adults who are already well out of high school but struggling to come to terms with the magnitude of that huge step.
When they do, they are free at last: Wyatt from his repression, and Ivy from her fake rebel persona. Well, mostly, anyway. In the end they stay true to themselves AND their thinly-veiled desires.