Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron's 'Long Shot' is a well-intentioned misfire

Stranger things have happened than a schlubby Brooklyn writer hooking up with a glamorous secretary of state. What pushes Long Shot from unexpected to downright unbelievable, however, is the context in which this coupling takes place.

The film, directed by Jonathan Levine and written by Liz Hannah and Dan Sterling, seems determined to comment on our current political climate — yet the world it creates feels so far removed from our own, it may as well exist in an alternate dimension.

At least its stars are lovable in any universe. Seth Rogen plays Fred Flarsky, who is most economically described as a Seth Rogen type: shaggy, sweet, and Too Much in a way that comes all the way back around to endearing.

Though he seems on paper like an odd fit for Charlize Theron's elegant Charlotte Field — that is the premise of this movie, after all — their romance feels grounded in sincere affection, mutual admiration, and shared values. There's real poignancy in his efforts to help her live a little, and Theron and Rogen seem like they're having a blast trying to make each other laugh.

If Long Shot were just about these two opposites attracting, that chemistry, along with the colorful supporting characters (June Diane Raphael is especially side-splitting as a campaign manager who can't be bothered), might be enough to keep the whole thing afloat. Unfortunately, it grafts this simple love story onto a far more ambitious one about gender and politics.

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Long Shot gets that being women in the public sphere face challenges that men don't, that men still have deeply ambivalent feelings about women in power, that the political game demands so many compromises that it can be easy to lose sight of what it's all for in the first place. The characters talk about all these things all the time.

But the film's insights into these issues never go beyond "read a Vox explainer one time" level. It glosses over how ugly and complicated these realities are, and offers solutions so simplistic that I didn't know whether to laugh or groan. By the time it begins expounding on the importance of seeing both sides, it's become very clear that the Long Shot universe split off from our own several years ago.

Maybe five or ten years ago, these observations would have felt surprising in a studio rom-com. In this day and age, they feel self-congratulatory. Long Shot is savvy enough to observe that even men who claim to like powerful women rarely do, but too oblivious to notice that by positioning Fred, our audience identification character, as the rare guy who actually does, it's essentially declaring "not all men."

Certainly, there's an argument to be made here that that's part of the fantasy. Here, finally, is a woman who might actually get to have it all, from the the groundbreaking career to the lofty ideals to the supportive boyfriend. And a man who gets to have it all, too — the meaningful job, the beautiful girlfriend, and the blissful imperviousness to society's toxic messaging about men, women, and heterosexual relationships.

It's that last one that gets me. Long Shot seems to think it's presenting a female fantasy and a male one simultaneously, and yet it's the female character who struggles most, who faces the harsher societal injustices, who has to learn the biggest lessons in the end. Meanwhile, the male character stumbles haphazardly into the life of his dreams and endures only the most half-hearted efforts at self-reflection.

And if it seems like I'm being too harsh on what is, in the end, just a fluffy, well-intentioned comedy — well, take it up with Fred Flarsky. He wouldn't compromise on his vision of a better world, and I refuse to, either.