Life or Something Like It (2002)

Life or Something Like It arrived in 2002 with Angelina Jolie as Lanie Kerrigan, a Seattle television reporter informed by a homeless prophet that she has seven days to live. The premise promises existential reckoning. What it delivers is a mild lesson about stopping to smell the roses, distributed across a montage of good deeds and one regrettable haircut. The film was a box office disappointment and Jolie earned a Razzie nomination, which tells you how the culture received its sermonizing at the time.

The cast is overwhelmingly white. The one notable minority presence, Tony Shalhoub, passes through the newsroom without a single line acknowledging his background. There are no queer characters, no racial commentary, no environmental concern, no body politics. Neurodivergence receives no affirmative treatment either; the homeless prophet is eccentric, perhaps unwell, and the film leaves it there. Lanie is a woman with a career, which is not nothing, but her arc resolves by abandoning the network job in New York for a cameraman in Seattle. The screenplay never frames this as a critique of anything. It is simply where the romance lands. A faint gesture toward the emptiness of ratings-chasing drifts through the newsroom scenes, though the target is personal fulfillment, not the machinery that manufactures the vanity.

The message is dramatized through plot and a closing voiceover about the part of her that has died, the part that did not know how to live. That is the entire apparatus. No lectures, no statistics, no direct appeal to the audience's conscience. It is a romantic comedy that wants us to seize the day and mostly wants us to buy a ticket. There is something almost restful about a film this uninterested in instructing anyone. It fails on its own modest terms, and it fails quietly.