Self Reliance Review: Jake Johnson and the Lonely Island Spoof Reality Television

Tommy Walcott (Jake Johnson) is stuck in a rut. Perpetually bored, he spends his days in a repetitive, lonely routine of work, working out, and watching old movies. Every now and then, he’ll make his way over to his ex-girlfriend’s house, but he always ends up slinking home without finding the courage to knock on the door. He’s a man crying out for someone to inject some intrigue into his life, and one day that cry is answered. By Andy Samberg.

The Brooklyn Nine-Nine star rolls up in a limousine and offers Tommy the chance to compete in a dark web game show. The rules are simple: For 30 days, Tommy will be hunted by anonymous killers from across the world, with a million-dollar prize up for grabs if he can survive until the end. The one big wrinkle is that the hunters are only allowed to kill Tommy while he’s alone, so all he has to do is find someone to hang out with for the duration of the game and the prize will be his. Naturally, that turns out to be a lot easier said than done.

Self Reliance, Johnson’s feature-length directorial debut, is effectively a light-hearted version of David Fincher’s The Game. Riffing on terrain explored by one on cinema’s modern masters—especially one as painstakingly precise as Fincher—is a daunting task for a first-time filmmaker, but Johnson gives himself a firm footing to work from by building the movie around exactly the sort of loveable schlub that he’s been playing for years. Indeed, like so many of Johnson’s creations, Tommy is a man who seems checked out enough that he would happily sign up to be hunted for sport simply because he didn’t have a whole lot else going on that day.

Once Tommy is in the game, Johnson’s well-practiced look of glazed-over indifference cracks and we get the more manic side of the actor’s comic skillset—all wide eyes, arched eyebrows, and rasping volubility. Tommy soon realizes not only that people really are trying to kill him, but that nobody in his life is willing to shadow him 24/7 just to make sure that doesn’t happen. Even discounting the fact that they don’t entirely believe his story about being swept away by Andy Samberg to compete in a dark web death game, his friends and family all have lives of their own.

That’s a lesson that many of us learn once we enter adulthood proper. Without his loved ones to lean on, Tommy initially protects himself by befriending a local homeless man, James (Biff Wiff), and paying him to stay by his side. Their oddball friendship is so extremely endearing that it’s almost a shame when James is subbed out for Maddy (Anna Kendrick), a fellow contestant on the game show. Johnson’s sardonic slacker routine, though, pairs well with Kendrick’s effervescent energy, and the two characters strike up a cute, if ultimately underdeveloped, romance as they while away the last few days of the contest together.

There’s never any danger of Self Reliance’s reach exceeding its grasp, but it gets a firm handle on the things it does want to achieve: tell good jokes, craft likeable characters, and strike a lighthearted tone that’s always just a little bit odder than you may be expecting. The humor in Johnson’s screenplay is self-aware without every becoming too meta, sarcastic without being overly acidic, and full of oddball touches (like the team of contortionist ninjas that secretly film the game show) while keeping one foot planted firmly in reality.

Even though the stakes of Self Reliance’s plot are life and death, the film never attempts to mine real tension from Tommy’s situation, eschewing it in favor of more funny scenes centered around his family’s increasingly exasperated reactions and the burgeoning bromance between Tommy and James. It does circle some deeper ideas about how easy the modern world makes it for an unmarried adult to become socially isolated but it never tries to make any grand statements about this state of affairs—just that they exist and that they kind of suck.