In Twenty 20-Fav, we’re spending 2025 examining the work of actor/director Jon Favreau. This week’s entry finds Favreau back in the familiar groove of the minor bit player.
People Like Us is the directorial debut of screenwriter Alex Kurtzman (a regular contributor in last year’s series). Co-written with Kurtzman’s writing partner Roberto Orci, the film is apparently loosely autobiographical. This fact does not make any of what I’m about to explain to you any better, and really only serves to pad out what is almost certainly going to be a very short review. Because this movie is the definition of disposable. It’s an excuse for some career professionals to get a few more hours of on-the-job training before going back to making the movies that cut real paychecks. People Like Us is competent. It’s professional. But it’s just not very good, is what I’m getting at.
Chris Pine stars as Sam, an up-and-coming businessman whose job is buying and flipping random overstock. He’s the reason your local Ollie’s Bargain Outlet always has such a wide selection of assorted crap. He’s also about to be investigated by the federal government for doing something incredibly stupid, the details of which are not important, so I’m gonna shunt that paragraph off to this footnote right here1.
Anyway, Sam’s girlfriend (Olivia Wilde) informs him that his dad has just died and they need to go home for the funeral. Afterward, Sam has lunch with one of his dad’s old buddies (Philip Baker Hall), who gives him a bag full of money and a note from his dad, instructing Sam to give the money to someone named Jake at the specified address. At that address, Sam discovers single mom Frankie (Elizabeth Banks) and her son Jake (Michael Hall D’Addario). Sam quickly learns that this is his half-sister and nephew, from a second family he never knew his father had. As Sam ingratiates himself into their lives, he struggles to find a way to tell them they’re all related, but their problems (Frankie’s a single mom working nights as a bartender and Jake acts out violently at school) constantly prevent him from doing so.
These complications are pretty baldly engineered to prolong the inevitable, because this is one of those stories where the entire conflict could have been resolved in an email. An awkward, confusing email that would likely result in a string of replies longer than necessary, and perhaps even a phone call or two, but you get the point. A lawyer could have handled this, and none of us would have to be here. But then that’s not dramatic, now is it? So allowing that we have to generate some kind of dramatic tension, Sam starts showing up to hang out with Frankie, hoping to find an opening to drop this particular bombshell on her.
This goes on for long enough that Frankie eventually comes to the conclusion that Sam is interested in her romantically, and while Sam (and us at home) know this is weird and skeevy and wrong, the movie does absolutely nothing to dissuade us from the notion that maybe they’d be good together. Sam and Frankie have meet-cute after meet-cute: He meets her at her AA meeting to commiserate over the loss of their dad; he meets her where she works to get to know each other, which somehow leads to them doing laundry together; she lets him start hanging out with Jake and sees what a good a father-figure he might be. They all hangout as a family and everyone seems really cool and chill about it, and if this were an actual romance, you could excuse every last bit of it because the chemistry is clearly there.
BUT OH, RIGHT! THIS CANNOT HAPPEN! If People Like Us were a comedy of errors—where Sam is constantly thwarted in his attempts to tell Frankie they’re related—I could almost see this working. But this isn’t a comedy of errors, nor is it a comedy of any kind. This is a bland, milquetoast drama pitched straight down the middle, made no better by the opening title card where we learn this was “INSPIRED BY TRUE EVENTS”. A version of this, apparently, actually happened to Alex Kurtzman; the details and circumstances almost certainly less weird that what we get here.
There’s really nothing more to say about this movie, because that right there is the entire ball game: People Like Us engineers a conflict that could have been settled if the two concerned parties would just get over themselves and have the hard conversation already, but because they can’t, we have to sit and watch a maybe-almost romance begin to form between two characters we already know aren’t gonna get together. It’s just… pointless. Why did I do this to myself?
THE FAVREAU DIMENSION
Jon Favreau appears in the very first scene playing Sam’s boss. He’s got the hotshot CEO energy that we’ve seen from him before, and that we’ll definitely see again. Not much more to tell than that.
FINAL RATING
2 stars (out of five). S’not great, you guys.
NEXT TIME: Back to the well.
- Okay, so Sam brokered a deal to resell some unbought boxes of soup. Boxes, as in cardboard packaging. And he had it shipped by train through the American southwest, where the heat caused the soup packages to expand, turn rotten, and then explode, resulting in about a dozen federal trade violations that the movie never really goes into. Suffice it to say, Sam’s company is now on the hook for this, and his boss (Jon Favreau) advises him to lawyer up because they are 100% gonna throw him under the bus. Not that this has anything at all to do with the story, but the screenplay has pages to fill, so here we are. ↩︎
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