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6 Month Rule
Directed by Blayne Weaver
Abramorama
Opens June 1, Village East
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You've seen guys like Tyler before. Not so often in the real world, but all the time in the movies. As played by writer-director Blayne Weaver, he's a charm-challenged, commitment-phobic cad, a rudderless, underemployed photographer who's somehow also a serial heartbreaker. We first see him in a bar booth, breaking up with a montage of scorned, stricken women, and think, as we're conditioned to, Who will tame this beast? Enter Sophie (Natalie Morales), a young artist inexplicably taken with Tyler but who also (of course) sees through his act. "I think you're sad," she says, which both pegs and whips him. Tyler's titular rule that any woman can be gotten over in six months' time is, naturally, challenged, which serves as one of the many ways in which the film capitulates to the rules of its chosen genre. Although he never persuades as a leading man, Weaver has the jittery, wearying instincts of a peripheral scene-stealer. Weaver has constructed a perfectly serviceable rom-com, one that, despite its low budget and even lower star-wattage (Jaime Pressly and John Michael Higgins turn in cameos), is quite analogous to big-studio product. The problem is that's not a high benchmark, and it's one that 6 Month Rule, with its taste for caricatures and aphoristic dialogue, strains to meet rather than exceed. As with the latest Kate Hudson comedy, it's a formula for irrelevancy pretty much as a rule.
