My Review of "Self Reliance"

Self Reliance is a straight to streaming comedy that came out in the beginning of 2024. When I first heard of the premise of the show I thought it was so wacky that it might just work. Unfortunately it has a lot of hiccups but it did show a ton of promise. They never reach the heights that I wanted them to go to. Maybe there was just too much in this movie that they should have just kept the focus a little tighter.

The movie starts out with the introduction of Tommy. He's a loner that seems to be stuck in a rut. He's going through the motions of life and seems miserable.

One day he gets approached by a limousine with Andy Samberg in the back. Andy asks Tommy to join him for a ride. Who is Tommy to refuse Andy especially since he looks up to him as an actor. Little does Tommy know, his life will forever be changed because of this ride.

The limousine takes Tommy to an abandoned warehouse where a seedy group of people make a proposal to him. They're part of a dark web organization that has fun with random people. In this case they chose Tommy for their game. The object of the game is to survive 30 days without getting killed by hired assassins. There is a loophole though, so long as Tommy is in the presence of someone he is safe from being harmed.

Tommy being the ever so optimistic person believes that he can beat this challenge no problem. He agrees to be involved in the game but he has no idea how difficult it will become as the days go by. That's basically the premise of the movie.

It nice that it's simple but the movie opens up into an exploration of Tommy's past, present and future. As he reveals the truth to his family, nobody believes him because the truth sounds so far fetched. In fact, not a lot of people believe him and in some ways the movie makes us start wondering if he's actually mentally unstable and dreaming up the whole thing.

As he reveals the truth to his family we learn that Tommy has issues in his life that have caused him to fall into the rut his in today. The reasons feel a little derivative. There's not too much new or original in terms of Tommy's issues. Some would say it's to make him feel more relatable but I thought it was a bit cliche.

At one moment, I felt like this movie then becomes a bit of a romantic comedy. I started to groan a little but then they switched it up again and was even self aware of this change. This started to feel a little disjointed after a while because of all the switching around. They wanted to add so much to the story but in some ways it lost a lot of the focus. I wasn't sure if this was about him or was it about the game or was it about the romantic story that they were trying to get on with. A little simplification of this movie would have done it wonders.

That's not to say there weren't any fun parts in this movie. There are certainly some funny and amusing areas of the movie but they don't come in too often. They mainly wanted to do some sort of character study of Tommy instead of going in for anything too deep.

Overall, I had an okay time with this one. There were times I almost abandoned this movie. As it is, I would say it's okay and not terrible. I definitely would not recommend this to any friends though. I have to give this movie a 5.5 out of 10.