'Everything About My Wife' Isn't As Funny As It's Made Up To Be

(SPOT.ph) Much of Everything About My Wife takes place seven years into the marriage of Dom and Imo (Dennis Trillo and Jennylyn Mercado). They used to be blissfully in love, but now Dom seems to dread Imo being anywhere around him, as her constant complaining has just totally worn him down. In Cebu, the couple meets Miguel (Sam Milby), a playboy who has women constantly chasing after him. After a night of heavy drinking, Dom and Miguel strike an unusual deal: MIguel will seduce Imo and try to get her to leave her husband.

The premise is the stuff of farce. One might imagine it as the plot of a 30s screwball comedy, a cast of actors given free reign to go completely ridiculous as they sketch out an outsized projection of the foibles of married life. In spite of its farcical premise, though, Everything About My Wife seems to be deadly serious about its depiction of married love. It purports to have lessons about what it means to be together for better or for worse, and in doing so creates something weirdly toxic.

An insane idea that needs to be called out

There’s just no getting around it: this is a movie about a guy who gets so tired of his wife’s complaining that he gets another guy to try and make him leave him. That is an insane idea, and has little to do with what real people go through. The movie does try to give a serious reason for the deterioration of this marriage, but it saves it all for a back half revelation. The film really does make it seem like the whole issue Dom has with his wife is that she complains too much, preventing him from having any peace.

And then the movie lays it out like this: they don’t actually have any reason to leave each other, and this somehow leads to the idea that the best thing that could happen is that another guy comes along to charm Imo and make her leave. This is insane, and it needs to be called out for being so. It certainly makes Dom seem like a real fool, and to an extent, it minimizes the agency of the female character. She becomes a pawn in the games of these two guys; a prize to be won rather than a living, breathing person.

More baffling things about Everything About My Wife

Putting aside the sheer insanity of the premise, the movie is just really clunky. It might do a fair job of putting together a big set piece, but it has trouble stringing things together in a way that makes sense. There’s a subplot that involves Imo joining a podcast, and the scene that leads into it is just baffling. Performances are generally okay, though. This really is Mercado’s turf, the actress as comfortable with shenanigans as she is with big, showy dramatics. Milby does schtick, but it works well enough. Trillo is charming, but it feels like there’s really nothing he can do to salvage this disaster of a character.

Everything About My Wife seems to want people to feel something for these characters, but it’s just really difficult to sympathize with anything that’s going on. It does try to get more real in the back half, but the shadow of its premise looms large over the emotional fireworks. In the end, what Dom does is unforgivable, and it becomes impossible to root for this couple to move on from these issues, no matter how good they look together.

Rating: 2 stars