The Female Brain

Cummings may have taken the easy way out here and there, but she largely delivers a film that kinda sorta makes you think, which isn’t a characteristic the genre is known for. Throughout, your feel-good chemicals will be flowing.

Both in front of and behind the camera, Whitney Cummings tries to breathe new life into the hackneyed, men-are-like-this, women-are-like-this style of romantic comedy with The Female Brain. The results are frustratingly hit-and-miss.

The formulaic approach to presenting each story — which ostensibly track different people Julia herself has studied, though she never interacts with them — is predictable, static, and wholly clinical.

Despite its strong cast (including Sofia Vergara, Cecily Strong, and James Marsden), The Female Brain has trouble making its characters more than one-dimensional.

With such a fractured narrative, it's difficult to get into a groove with these short, shallow and over-simplified stories.

Cummings, working from a Louann Brizendine book, has rendered romance clinical and forgotten to drop more sugar water in the Petri dish. She was too busy clinging to that “explain the brain” conceit to notice. The movie’s just not that damned funny.

All I know is it’s excruciatingly dull. It pains me to see industrious people wasting time, chasing their tails and turning into butter when they could be taking a nap — which is what I did at regular intervals during The Female Brain.