Film Review: I Feel Pretty

Renee Bennett (Amy Schumer) is a perfectly normal woman. She has an average body type, uses YouTube tutorials to do her hair, and dreams of having a more glamorous job.

And because we live in a society that rarely shows average women onscreen, preferring to celebrate the rare few who conform to every socially constructed idea of beauty and pretend it is they who are the norm, Renee feels crap about herself. Until, that is, a freak accident causes Renee to see herself as one of the smoking-hot model-esque beauties she has always envied. Her appearance hasn’t changed, just her self-image and her confidence.

Let’s address the good stuff first. Schumer is fearless on-screen, and many interactions will feel accurate to the average woman, such as pre-magic-inner-makeover Renee staring at Emily Ratajkowski in awe and marvelling at her life. The supporting cast are great too, with Rory Scovel as the sensitive cute-guy Ethan and Michelle Williams an uproarious scene-stealer as the breathy head of Lily LeClaire.

The bad news is essentially everything else. Overlong and with a very noticeable lack of genuinely funny scenes or even killer one-liners, there’s a blandness to I Feel Pretty that wastes Schumer’s comic talents. The disappointing humour highlights the film’s confused internal logic and its dramatic failings.

When Renee believes herself to be beautiful, there’s a brief arc that sees her become shallow and obnoxious, as she upscales her lifestyle and condescends to average people like her friends. Unfortunately, the writers seem afraid of offending The Beautiful Ones, and this thread is dropped quickly.

And of course, there’s the major philosophical flaw of I Feel Pretty: Amy Schumer is not unattractive. Many more woman will feel alienated by this two-hour-long assertion that they should feel self-conscious, and that to be confident is a “brave choice”, rather than the right and natural one.