Jexi (2019)

Jexi arrives as a studio comedy about a man who loves his phone more than he loves people, which by 2019 was already the premise of roughly every third thinkpiece. Phil, played by Adam DeVine, works at a BuzzFeed-adjacent content farm, writes listicles he despises, and acquires a virtual assistant with boundary issues. The film's cultural inventory is modest. The cast is unusually diverse for the genre, with Alexandra Shipp as the romantic lead and Michael Peña, Wanda Sykes, Ron Funches, and Kid Cudi orbiting the margins, though the screenplay never pauses to notice. Race is not a subject here. Neither is queerness. The movie holds one idea about how people ought to live, and that idea is that they should look up from the screen now and then.

It delivers that idea by way of dick pics, kickball injuries, and a self-driving car chase. Cate, the bike shop owner, is written as competent and direct, which earns the film a flicker of credit it does not otherwise pursue. The surrounding sensibility remains locker-room. The satire of clickbait media lands a few glancing blows at corporate absurdity without ever suggesting the arrangement itself might be the problem. The phone is the villain. The company is background noise.

Instead of argument, the film offers a moral, stated plainly and with little conviction: put the device down, talk to someone. It arrives through crude gags and a foul-mouthed operating system voiced by Rose Byrne, who is doing far more work than the material deserves. The film seeks credit for a sentiment it never bothers to dramatize. We are told that connection matters. We are shown a man terrorized by his own settings menu. The lesson is sound, the delivery is a shrug, and the whole enterprise settles somewhere between a cautionary tale and a prank.