It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

(55%) For a comedy about abject loneliness, lost love, combined with a strong element of suicide, this is quite a bold interesting move, and largely it works. Martin is great, James Grodin provides a good share of the better laughs in fine support, the pacing is decent, and even if it's uneven from the very beginning it still worked out miles better than it could have given the quite dark premise as it never really allows itself to get too bleak or down hearted. The romantic main plot is as loopy as everything else in this almost cartoonish New York city setting, but a good heart keeps everything running and largely together.

Steve Martin finds himself transported into the world of the Lonely Guy when he finds his wife in bed with another man and she kicks poor old Martin out.Martin makes a new best friend in Charles Grodin, another lonely guy. Grodin teaches Martin about the world New York's lonely guy's and together they each try to find a new love.It's well played by both Martin & Grodin, there are some good gags and very amusing moments in the fist hour of the film. For the last 20 minutes or so it becomes a bit less fun and feels a little bit like it's dragging.I was hoping to see a great comedy performance from Grodin, who I recently discovered via his excellent performance in Taking Care of Business (he was the only good thing about that film) but here his character was very subdued and didn't really have any funny lines. Not his fault, obviously, but feels like a bit of a waste of talent.Decent film over all, which I will enjoy re-watching at some point in the future.

The movie doesn't really have the usual typical sort of comedy you would expect from an '80's Steve Martin movie. It's humor is often more in its little things, or one word that is spoken in its dialog. The movie doesn't build up to its jokes like a normal comedy would do but often things just come out of nowhere. It doesn't make this movie as humor filled as you would perhaps expect but it does make the movie somewhat original and somehow also real pleasant.Too bad that the story is such a weak one. The story doesn't seem to have one clear focus and subplots are not handled well enough. This has as a result that some moments and even characters just don't work out properly for the movie. It makes the movie also really a weak one to watch at times. The love-story just was too weak and not well developed enough. Judith Ivey is also supposed to be in her mid-20's in this movie but instead looks closer to 40, while Steve Martin also works around a bit too much without his shirt on. It are mainly small things such as these that also makes the movie irritating at parts as well as weak, simply since it doesn't work out all as well as obviously intended.This movie could had been a great homage to the lonely guy but instead its story is all over the place, jumping from the one thing to another. It doesn't really give a good or fair portrayal of the average lonely guy, who normally is shy and just not the way Steve Martin portrays it in this movie. Charles Grodin is perhaps way better but he's just only playing second violin in this movie.Still a pleasant enough little movie to watch but just no genre classic, since it has way too many weaknesses, mainly concerning its story.6/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

This has to be one of Steve Martin's worst movies, and the main reason is that he's working from a hackneyed script created by Neil Simon, along with a couple of TV sitcom writers. The whole thing seems like it came out of a meeting where a staff of writers for a variety show were trying to come up with funny situations involving Lonely Guys. Some of the situations would have worked nicely as a blackout on a TV show, but in a feature film they just seem like unconnected building blocks.The script doesn't play to Martin's strengths (wacky physical humor or surrealistic verbal humor), so he's playing a role that any bland actor - picture someone like Tony Roberts - could have done almost as well. Charles Grodin is merely an annoyance as the one-dimensional geeky lonely guy, and the main female characters are also static and uninteresting.Even Jerry Goldsmith, who has beefed up many a marginal movie with a good score, goes vanilla here and gives us a bunch of goopy 80s cues, sounding like Dave Grusin on Prozac. The vocal numbers are horrendous, especially the screeching opening credit song by America, featuring a bad 80s drum machine/synth track. If you want a better early Steve Martin film, pick either the one BEFORE this ("Man with two Brains") or the one AFTER ("All of Me"), both of which are much better suited to his personality.