Beautiful Disasters review and cast interviews: A pitch perfect romantic comedy

Beautiful Disasters is a brand new movie based on the book by author Jamie McGuire. The film stars Virginia Gardner and Dylan Sprouse in the lead role. Below I share my review of the movie and some excerpts from my interview with the two stars.

Beautiful Disasters follows a first-year college student who tries to distance herself from her past while resisting her attraction to a new bad boy at school, Travis. The brilliant mind behind Cruel Intentions and After We Collided, Roger Kumble, adapted and directed the film.

Beautiful Disasters is a pitch perfect romantic comedy

We meet Abby (Gardner), who is leaving home to start her first year in college. Upon arriving, her best friend takes her to an underground fight where she meets Travis (Sprouse). She is very attractive to him but tells him that he isn’t her type. After busting her stalking his Instagram profile, he pushes her to agree to go on a date with him.

While Abby plays hard to get, before one of his fights, Travis bets Abby that if his opponent can’t hit him one time, she has to live with him for a month, but if he does hit him, he can’t have sex for four months. Abby plays with fire agreeing to the bet as she watches Travis dissect his opponent on his way to winning the bet. I asked Dylan Sprouse about his training for the role of this underground fighter, and here is what he had to say.

"I certainly did more training than I’m generally comfortable with. I’m a little bit of an introvert. I like to sit at home and play video games and relax on the couch. I bet so. So I’m definitely more of a like I’m like a big cat. We did about four hours of training a day, and I’m thankful to say that I worked with some of the best trainers, both in stunts and bodybuilding and training in general, and so that was pretty intense.The food was actually the hardest part, though. It’s because to gain muscle, you need to eat, but so much more than you’re used to, and I’m a big eater in general. I love eating, but it’s all food that has no flavor. So you’re eating like ten filets of fish with a big bowl of broccoli and a big bowl of brown rice with no salt and pepper."

Roger Kemble has been in the game for a long time and knows when he has magic in his hands, as he did with this story. His writing is pitch perfect with how he balanced this story’s action, comedy, and romance. He allows the viewer to fall for these characters by developing their story to make them relatable.

Speaking of these characters, Kemble’s incredible script is brought to life by Dylan Sprouse and Virginia Gardner, whose on-screen chemistry is the film’s heartbeat. The two are perfect together, whether it’s the comedic barbs back and forth or within those intimate moments. There is a scene where Abby throws up on Travis after kissing him, and I asked Virginia Gardner about an embarrassing moment she’s had while drunk, here’s what she said.

"I’m not a puker, as I hate vomit so much. But I did have one too many one night, and I Postmated $90.00 worth of McDonald’s to my house. I spent $90.00 on McDonald’s for just myself, but I felt like I needed that much food at the time and unfortunately threw up on the doorstep upon arriving at my house. I went promptly to bed, my fiance was left to clean up my mess, and then $90.00 of McDonald’s just showed up as he’s cleaning up, and he’s like the delivery guys bringing him a big bag of McDonald’s and Jed’s just outside, like, what is going?"

Overall, Beautiful Disasters isn’t reinventing the rom-com world with this movie, as it is quite predictable. However, Sprouse and Gardner make this much better than your typical romcom because of their work together. I really loved this quite a bit and highly recommend checking it out.

Beautiful Disasters hits digital and VOD on May 2.