Big Sick has a lot going for it. It took the tired old boy-meats-girl story and added a big ethnic kick to it which made it endearingly fresh. There's also a lot of unpredictability in it. And when the boy loses the girl, he almost really loses her. The scenes with Kumail's family were by far my favorite. I also loved his scenes with Emily's parents. Oddly next to all those the relationship at the center of the movie felt kind of bland, even boring. I had a hard time buying the big reciprocal love between them. It didn't make sense that Emily, a psychology grad student at the one of the nation's top universities, would be this shocked and upset to learn about Kumail's difficulties with his family and them attempting to force him into an arranged marriage. Unless, perhaps, she wasn't all that into him in the first place. The dialogue, especially among the younger actors sometimes felt like improv and not in a good way - more raw than natural. All in all, there was a lot I liked, specifically lot of scenes I liked, but there was something wobbly in the way they all came together and I just couldn't love the end result.
Review of The Big Sick
