A romantic comedy with delusions of dramatic grandeur, Fly Me to the Moon (July 12, in theaters) has a frothy premise that it treats with a dismal degree of seriousness.
Director Greg Berlanti’s film boasts two likable stars in a story that playfully riffs on a well-known conspiracy theory about the historic Apollo 11 moon landing. Yet rather than using its cheeky conceit for zippy humor and enticing amour, it spends excessive time on trauma, guilt, regret, and other heavy topics that are as ill-fitting as they are superficially handled. Aiming for the stars, it proves a laborious affair that rarely gets off the ground.
In Manhattan circa the late ’60s, Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson) is a hotshot ad executive who fakes a pregnancy while delivering a dynamite pitch that charms the pants off chauvinistic Ford executives. Kelly is a proto-Don Draper and, as is soon revealed, also a female Saul Goodman—a con woman in cute period outfits who’s operating under one of numerous false identities. This is precisely what makes her so appealing (and manipulatable) to Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson), a shadowy employee of President Richard Nixon who wants Kelly for a job of the highest priority: selling the upcoming moon landing to the American public.
