10

As odd as it is to say out loud, 10 is very much a precursor to Apatow sex comedies, and their imitators, such as 40 Year-Old Virgin and Zach and Miri Make a Porno. Perhaps the film it most closely resembles is Knocked Up. It is a bawdy romantic comedy that’s main theme is around the need to grow up. However, it has a number of technical flaws, dated representations, and oddities in the script that make it feel like it doesn’t doesn’t quite belong in the conversation with those films that it may, or may not, have inspired.

As a bawdy comedy, it is mostly bawdy and not much comedy. Undeniably, the movie has plenty of naked breasts, butts, and bushes to please anyone in the 1970s who didn’t have ready access to Playboy or the like, let alone a modern viewer’s access to the Internet. So the bawdy thing it does fine. It even does a yeoman’s job of justifying, in narrative, why there are so many fairly pointless and arguably gratuitous shots of naked people. The comedy part, or more specifically the use of bawdy elements in the name of comedy, did not really work for me. This isn’t American Pie, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Superbad, etc. where the shocking and sexual material is well integrated into the humor itself. Often, though not always, the nudity feels purely vestigial to the story. It is far more explicit than in a modern racy comedy and yet also is just sort of there to be there with no other reason.

As a Knocked Up-like story about an untethered man-child that needs to grow up, the basic idea is solid but the execution is not quite there. For starters, there is something odd about the pacing. We spend way too much time in the beginning of the film being exposed to the worst version of Dudley Moore’s protagonist, revealing him to be a lecherous, vaguely misogynistic, cantankerous fellow that is teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown about being middle aged. This is all a fine place to start a character transformation, but the extent to which the film languishes in this version of the character makes it hard to root for that transformation when it starts to happen; you just kind of hate the guy too much to care. Then, the middle section of the film doesn’t spend enough time building the basis for his transformation. It doesn’t show how the culmination of his experiences are reshaping his worldview. In Knocked Up, for example, Seth Rogan’s character has an important conversation with his father about fatherhood that plays a key role in shifting Rogan towards choosing a more adult frame of mind. 10 has no such foundation laying for its character arc. Instead it gives us more zany antics that, while often funny, don’t help move the story forward. The final act is exceedingly short, heralded by a transformative moment for the main character that happens so quickly and so out of the blue that while the psychological shift we observe in him is totally believable, it makes the end of the movie feel rushed and a tad unearned.

I also found elements of the ending just completely implausible. Admittedly I’m not living in the 1970s and I’m not the most promiscuous person to begin with, but the entire idea that Moore’s character would be given the opportunity to have sex with the woman that he almost has sex with is so beyond what is believable to me that it strained my suspension of disbelief with each passing step; as dinner became dancing and dancing became something more.

Dudley Moore seems to have made a career out of playing vaguely unlikable man-children. His two most famous movies, this one and Arthur, both share that in common. However, for all I critique about the pacing problems of the movie, Moore’s character here is at least a more redeemable figure than the one he plays in Arthur. Moore is more charismatic, and is allowed to lean more into his talents for performance, in a way that makes Julie Andrews being in love with him despite his childishness make at least a modicum of sense. His struggles with growing older, manifesting in a series of wildly misguided adventures, are more relatable and plausible than whatever Arthur is struggling with in his movie. Both movies struggle with the third act redemption for their characters, unsure how to call them out for their flaws without seeming like a wet blanket on the movie’s fun (which is often a product of those flaws). In 10, I believe the film is going for a monkey’s paw type moment, where he gets everything he thinks he wants only to discover he doesn’t want it, but the payoff of that moment is unsatisfying for some reason.

I don’t think 10 is a bad movie, though it is very much of its time, but I also don’t think I would recommend this movie to anyone. I just don’t know who the audience would be. People who want a bawdy comedy are better served with any of a dozen early 2000s sex comedies, many of which I have already listed in this review. People who want a redemptive romantic comedy have better focused romances like Crazy Stupid Love or Just Friends. People who want to see boobs and butts have Internet porn. For a modern audience, this movie just doesn’t offer anything that can’t be found better somewhere else.

Would Recommend: If you want to see Bo Derek running on the beach in a swimsuit.

Would Not Recommend: If gratuitous nudity makes you uncomfortable.