A romantic comedy that doesn’t rely on an unlikely high concept premise, Something Borrowed is full of genre cliches and predictable moments but it carries it out with enough laughs to keep both genders in the audience entertained.

Rachel (Ginnifer Goodwin) has a bit of a problem. She has been in love with Dex (Colin Egglesfield) since law school but when she chickened out on telling him how she felt, her best friend Darcy (Kate Hudson) swooped in and got him. Reserved  Rachel has always felt overshadowed by the larger than life and kinetic Darcy and just accepts this turn of events as the natural order of things. Darcy gets what she wants and Rachel gets to be alone. The real problem comes when Rachel gets drunk at her birthday party and sleeps with Dex in what turns out to be not nearly as much of an accident as either would like to admit. With support by her best friend Ethan (John Krasinski), Rachel has to figure out what she should do and how she should do it.

I would be lying if I said this was my kind of movie. I am not a really big Kate Hudson fan outside of Almost Famous and romantic comedies aren’t typically my thing. Something Borrowed, however, really shows that strong performances and clever writing can elevate cliches and well worn plot structures into something entertaining and easily digestible.

One thing that kind of irritates me about movies in general is that often whenever the main character does something bad the writer feels the need to add in a pressure valve to make the audience feel more comfortable. So if the main character is a lying, deceitful cheater then the injured party has to be that much worse to maintain the sense that the character you are rooting for is still the good guy. Something Borrowed is no different and sort of nerfs its moral struggles with bolder shades of black and white than I think are particularly necessary. I would like to see a film like this really tackle the moral implications involved with what is going on without falling back on this crutch but in the case of this film it can be argued that if Darcy weren’t such an insufferable bitch in the first place none of this would be happening anyway and that is a point well taken.

That is one of the clever things the film manages to do is that it lives in the cliches and it does the things expected of it by a mainstream audience but it does so with internal justification and in such a way that it fits with the film itself. It also tries to solve some of the more cliched issues with romances with varying results. The film tries really hard to make Dex a character drawn well enough to pine for and it succeeds far more than a lot of movies ever hope to.

What really makes this movie work though is that it is genuinely funny. The jokes never seem forced and flow naturally from characters who feel real. No one feels like a caricature and even the more outlandish characters have depth to make them feel real.

The performances are just what they should be to sell the material. Ginnifer Goodwin seems to be doing more or less what she did in He’s Just Not That Into You but that is okay because it is what the role calls for. Kate Hudson drove me completely batshit in this movie and that is pretty much perfect as the character is meant to be insufferable. Colin Egglesfield has the least to do as Dex but he acquits himself well enough. John Krasinski is the standout here as he is hilarious and provides a bit of  a touchstone for the audience who might be frustrated by some of the other characters making stupid mistakes.

Conclusion [8.0 out of 10]

Something Borrowed isn’t perfect but it succeeds at being a funny film that should satisfy a date night without leaving either person cold. Sure it follows cliches and well worn pathways but it does so in a funny and entertaining way. If you are looking for a good date movie, you could do a lot worse.