Synopsis
The Layover, helmed by William H. Macy and released in 2017, is a light romantic comedy whose ribald yet breezy plot intertwines themes of camaraderie, competition, and unexpected love. It chronicles Kate and Meg, inseparable childhood friends, who impulsively book a getaway in an attempt to break free from the tedium of strained careers and unsatisfying romantic entanglements. Their intended journey of leisure is upended when a fortuitous flight delay reveals a shared attraction to the same charming fellow traveler, igniting a spirited contest between the two women.
Kate, deftly rendered by Alexandra Daddario, is a demure but perceptive high-school instructor hemmed in by curricular monotony and a falteringly held romance. Meg, counterpoint to Kate and embodied with infectious buoyancy by Kate Upton, is an impulsive cosmetics specialist whose carefree demeanor conceals insecurities of its own. Despite the contrast in temperament, the sisters in spirit maintain a hive of mutual understanding, banter, and affection, making their dynamic both credible and compelling to the audience.
When their flight to Fort Lauderdale is diverted by a ruthless hurricane, Kate and Meg suddenly find themselves marooned in a St. Louis airport for a day. A chance seating next to a dashing, quick-witted stranger named Ryan (Matt Barr) sparks instantaneous interest from both women. Chance reunions amid endless terminal delays catalyze a friendly fling that quickly curdles into full-scale competition, prompting Kate and Meg to devise increasingly fiendish schemes to divert Ryan’s attention from the other.
The narrative spills forward in a riotous sequence of travel mishaps and romantic near-misses. There are accidental wardrobe malfunctions, hotel-room–knife-to-the-back sabotage, and a botched spa day that leaves all three protagonists looking, to put it charitably, patently hysterical. Yet amid the sliding glass doors, hijinks, and gleaming beverage carts, affectionate slapstick yields to darker comedy as resentments buried even deeper than a TSA lineup begin to boil. The contest for Ryan’s time simultaneously illuminates—then, almost catastrophically, fractures—the covenant the women had always presumed impervious.
The narrative pivots dramatically when Ryan’s veneer of perfection shatters, prompting the women to confront the fleeting worth of romantic exploits compared to the enduring worth of sisterhood. The denouement fosters reconciliation: the two friends reclaim the resiliency of their tie, departing the frame infused with newfound self-knowledge and the imprint of measurable maturation.
Cast & Crew
Alexandra Daddario as Kate
Daddario embodies the steadier, introspective half of the duet. Having garnered acclaim in projects such as San Andreas and the Percy Jackson saga, she marries levity with acute comic timing. Daddario’s work deepens the emotional arc of a role that, in less dexterous hands, might risk monotony.
Kate Upton as Meg
Upton, in one of her most substantive performances to date, renders Meg as the flighty, almost superficial figure whose surface ease conceals inner fragility. Even framed primarily as a model, she commands the comic set pieces and conspicuously reciprocates Daddario’s energy, weaving scenes of sincere connection with apparent spontaneity.
Matt Barr as Ryan
Barr, whose credits include the recent Blood & Treasure and the cult-favorite Hellcats, embodies the gorgeous stranger who quickly captures the protagonist’s orbit. Though Ryan functions principally as a narrative catalyst, Barr invests him with just enough verisimilitude to lend credence to the fleeting spark, playing the smitten-surfacing-but-fleeting romantic with effortless glint.
Rob Corddry and Kal Penn voice the oddball personnel who staff the film’s allegorically named flyover hotel. Corddry, in particular, delivers a crate of absurdist color that nudges the film toward loopy absurdism, slicing through the romantic haze with surreal flourishes that seem to arrive directly from the margins of the screenplay.
Director: William H. Macy
Having grabbed the plum cymbal after handling the straight man, Macy now stretches the baton a second time. His freshman outing, the solemn adolescence-venture Rudderless, could scarcely be further from this pastel-scaled journey, yet in his capable hands, The Layover’s comedy pivots with deliberate caricature, channeling the visual tropes of classic road and romantic comedies while sonically threading the limit-pushing silliness that the starry titles scarcely dared to proclaim.
Writers: David Hornsby and Lance Krall
The script’s marquee was locked in through David Hornsby—a rising star-roommate of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s renegade collective—and Lance Krall, a fellow architect of colorfully ruined-tomb sitcoms. Hornsby and Krall have traded this hotel-com forter of a script in for helium arguments, sad yet spot-on diagnosis of urban love’s contortions, sly stalker beat boxes, and uproar subordinate pursuits. Scarcely half the film’s dialogues land with the pins-stuck-together-forever smack experienced audiences crave, and a third bounces off as gauche, sloppy slapstick’s stretchy bursts that respond to a code of grim underroutine.
IMDb Ratings & Critical Reception
Currently, The Layover registers around 48 on the IMDb aggregate, based on several tens of thousands of brief verdicts, a figure translating to modest esteem on the platform. The aggregate mirrors a predominantly cool response, both from critics and rank-and-file viewers. Commentators routinely charge the movie with derivative plotting and a script perfumed with shopworn comic devices.
The most reiterated objection is the screenplay’s preference for coarse banter, which several reviewers believe patronizes the rom-com brief rather than refurbishes it. Critics observe that the protagonists are sketched with little affective resonance and that the competitive dynamic between the two women skews merciless rather than mischievous. Others censured the film for sensualizing the depicted personas without granting the incipient romances texture or closure.
Conversely, a minority of spectators defended the picture as light cargo meant for low-stakes consumption. Commentators recognised the reciprocal heat created by Daddario and Upton, referring to scenes weighted with camaraderie as the material’s most effective. A scattering of spectators confessed to deriving modest embarrassment from the film’s brazen excesses, which are occasionally30 spun as a benign vice.
- With a visible modesty from a production perspective, the film targeted a limited theatrical release paired with a primary emphasis on video-on-demand. The Layover illustrates a strategic intent to occupy the low-risk, easily consumable comedy zone, one that forgoes aspirational status in favor of presenting itself as a light, straightforward diversion for viewers.
- The film seeks to synthesize a road-trip adventure, a love-triangle premise, and a buddy-comedy framework in varying degrees of assembly, and the outcome remains inconsistent. The opening conceit is worthy, the leading performers display chemistry, yet the movie vacillates in comedic register and too frequently resorts to worn conventions and foreseeable beats. Even so, devotees of the form willing to indulge the absurd and firmly lowbrow may locate modest satisfaction in its excesses, for the picture reserves its keenest attention for the navigation of female camaraderie, including the resulting turbulence produced by a shared romantic prospect. Beneath its scrappier surface, the film arrives at the elemental conclusion that friendship is worth prioritizing over the temporality of flirtation and, while the comedic momentum may falter, several jokes locate the pulse of that modest wisdom.
Among the wider panorama of romantic comedies, The Layover scarcely aspires to redefine the genre; however, it affirms the lasting charm of narratives that intertwine camaraderie, romance, and the capriciousness of mobility.
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