Coupon crime!
BQB here with a half-off review.
This is a 2021 movie that flubbed at the box office in 2021 yet found a new life on Netflix this year and has been going strong as of late. So yes, once in a while, Netflix does a good deed because this one is worth a watch.
The plot? Connie Kaminsky (Kristen Bell) is, like so many people of the millennial generation, someone who did all the right things, yet landed flat on her face. She’s a retired Olympic racing walker (yes, apparently that’s really an event) but never found fame nor fortune. Her husband, Rick is such a dick that a) he works for the IRS and b) he’s played by Joel McHale, the go-to guy whenever Hollywood needs an actor to play a dick in a comedy.
Even worse, Connie’s plagued by outrageous debt, the result of multiple IVF treatments that didn’t work. In her late thirties, she desperately wants a baby yet for all her effort, all she has to show for it is a humongous bill that never goes away.
In the hopes of cutting that bill down, Connie takes up the art of couponing. She becomes a whiz at saving money, scouring fliers for savings and is the bane of the existence of her local A and G Food Mart cashier.
She teams up with her neighbor JoJo (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) a wannabe social media influencer who lives with her mom because of debt she incurred when a fraudster stole her identity. Together, Connie and JoJo develop quite the local reputation as coupon queens. So adept are they at spotting deals that they even share their free stuff with others in the community.
Alas, they get quite greedy. Connie and JoJo track down a factory in Mexico responsible for printing and shipping most of the coupons throughout the U.S. They persuade a corrupt employee couple (husband and wife team) to send illicit coupons for free stuff their way, which the duo then, in turn, sells at a lower price over the internet.
Confused? Say a product costs 10 bucks. Just buy one of Connie’s coupons for 5 bucks and save 5 bucks. Got it now? Good.
The coupon queens make big buckaroos and are living large until A and G food market loss prevention officer Ken Miller (Paul Walter Hauser) gets wise to the scam. Noticing that his store chain is losing a lot of money to this fraudulence, he teams with U.S. Postal Inspector Simon Kilmurry (Vince Vaughn) to hunt the ladies down.
From there on, you’re not sure who to root for because Connie and JoJo are two women who did everything right only to get crapped on their entire lives and finally they give up and start breaking the rules to get ahead and who can blame them when following the rules got them nowhere? Yet, Ken is great as his job but everyone hates him because his job largely involves being the dick that has to tell old ladies that their coupon for half-off roid cream is invalid and they have to pay full price for their butt itch relief medicine. He dreams of busting a huge case wide open and this is his chance. Vaughn is funny as he has to remind Ken that yes, he indeed, is a real cop who just happens to work for the post office. He has a badge and gun and if necessary, can shoot people.
The good? It’s funny and the scam (based on a real life case) is inventive. It’s interesting how it all unfolds and I know I wanted to see it through to the end to find out how it was all going to go down.
The bad? Given the film’s subject matter, i.e. couponing and shopping, I feel like this movie’s number one target audience would be moms, grandmas, those ladies of the house in charge of doing all the family’s shopping who know how to wield a coupon like an Old West Sheriff wields a six-shooter. Thus, I think the film errs in using bad language that will likely turn a lot of these moms off and doesn’t really add anything to the plot or the comedy yet gives it an R rating that will probably cause a lot of women who would have otherwise been into it to pass it by.
But that’s just my two cents.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy.
Bookshelf Battle 