A movie review by Cassandra Lim

Date of Release: 18th December 2008

Language: English

Running Time: 104 mins

Rating: PG

Genre: Comedy

Starring: Zooey Deschanel, Jim Carrey

Directed by: Peyton Reed, Scout Taylor-Compton

Rated: ***/*****

If everything in life seems to be going wrong, or if you are sick of doing the same thing over and over again each day, try watching Yes Man, and perhaps your life might start changing for the better. Yes Man features funny man, Jim Carrey as Carl Allen, a negative and monotonous guy, who works at a bank as a loan officer, with his pet word, ‘No’. After attending a unique self-help seminar, a series of events starts to happen, changing his life in a way he never would have thought of, breaking personal conventions. A single word, ‘YES’, seems to really lead to something good, with the opposite triggering the bad.

Learning various things that might always come in handy seems to go really smoothly in the movie. Although the plot might seem quite predictable, the bits and pieces of humour make up for it. One notable character that stands out is Carl’s boss, Norman, a really geeky guy, a child at heart who seems to really want to get close with Carl, with all that weird antics and funny gestures (not forgetting his costumes parties of all sorts). And in every movie, there’s ought to be a female lead character, which in this case, Zooey Deschanel plays Allison, a young pretty indie band girl, who takes the world as her playground, is someone who plays at the same bar with the same band with improvised lyrics in every performance for the same audience of five every weekend, an exact opposite of Carl.

Although there’s a little hint of ‘Liar, Liar’ in this movie, there’s still something fresh from Jim Carrey as he speaks of a different language, Korean, in a segment of the movie, which was quite hilarious because of his failed tone in the language , in my opinion.

Nonetheless, Yes Man did make me leave the cinema with the wanting to say ‘Yes’ to everything, just for the fun of it. I would recommend this light-hearted comedy, with a predictable storyline, worth to watch if you just want to laugh away. Else, I would say, ‘Yes!’ to watching this movie but ‘No’ to watching it a second time.