‘Sick Girl’ Movie Review: An Annoying, Irresponsible Comedy About Faking The Big C
Photo from Lionsgate
From Jeremy Kibler
Female-driven or not, Sick Girl has to be one of the most irresponsible comedies in recent memory. Watching a selfish protagonist let an unforgivable lie get wildly out of hand could be funny—and it is played for laughs here—but it seems like the movie is late to the party with the notion that “women can be just as messy and horrible as the guys.” Not that you can’t make a movie with a character lying about having cancer, but Sick Girl needed a second or third opinion on the script.
Nina Dobrev plays Wren Pepper (now that’s a name!), a codependent thirtysomething who doesn’t have her life together. She drinks too much and she still smokes, as if nothing has changed in fifteen years. Her friends, Laurel (Sherry Cola), Cece (Stephanie Koenig), and Jill (Hayley Magnus), have their own responsibilities—respectively, training for a marathon, just trying to stay awake with a young daughter at home, and balancing a high-stress job and a kid—but Wren is a sloppy mess who still needs a friend to bail her out (even literally from prison after getting too drunk). After Wren feels they’ve drifted apart so much, she finally snaps during her low-key birthday celebration and lies about having cancer. From there, Wren somehow convinces her three best friends that the best treatment is spending more time together, leading to a speedy recovery.
Making her writing-directing debut, longtime casting director Jennifer Cram means Sick Girl to be funny, even poignant, about female friendship, not a nuanced character study about an attention-craving liar. Typically an appealing actor with the right material, Nina Dobrev is tasked with the impossible as Wren. She tries but fails to make us care about this immature, unlikable character and whether or not her friends will still love her after she comes clean. These overly gullible friends go so far as to plan a fundraising event for her “tonsil throat cancer” and two out of three shave their heads.
Brandon Mychal Smith is at least charming as Leo, whom Wren meets at a cancer therapy group because, you know, he actually has cancer. It’s with Leo that the film almost starts to work once he realizes Wren is healthy and puts her through the “treatment,” as he should. Sherry Cola, Stephanie Koenig, and Hayley Magnus are all very funny together, but it’s too bad they don’t get to play best friends with Dobrev in a smarter script. Far less believable is leading us to believe that Wendi McLendon-Covey and Dan Bakkedahl made someone who looks like Nina Dobrev (and no offense to them). They sell these overprotective parent clichés as amusingly as they can, but they’re distractingly miscast and playing beneath their intelligence.
By the end, it doesn’t even feel as if Wren has actually learned anything or atoned (spoiler alert: she does become an organ donor). The redemption arc writer-director Cram has given this character is too insincere and inconsequential to redeem the film itself, bookending with Wren and her girlies blasting Fall Out Boy’s “Sugar, We’re Going Down” as if Wren will just go back to her old ways. We don’t go to the movies to watch characters do the right thing and be likable all the time, but Sick Girl goes so far in the other direction that it’s irreparably wrongheaded. Waiting for this alleged “sick girl” to grow the hell up is a terminally annoying experience.
Rating: 1/5
Sick Girl hits theaters, digital and on demand on October 20, 2023.
