By Dalton Johnson
@DaltonsFrameofMind
Nineteen years after *Superman Returns* gave us Brandon Routh as the Man of Steel and Sam Huntington as Jimmy Olsen, the two are back on screen together — this time as best-friend lawyers trying to survive a runaway pharmaceutical lawsuit in Guy Jacobson’s screwball comedy *Out of Order!*, which arrives in Dallas this Saturday for the USA Film Festival following its October premiere at the Chelsea Film Festival. If you’re a Brandon Routh fan (and if you’re reading this, you probably are), this is the reunion you didn’t know you needed.
Routh stars as John Slater, a down-on-his-luck lawyer at a struggling storefront firm in Los Angeles. When the movie opens, Slater is getting dumped by his glamorous supermodel girlfriend Lisa — played by Tao Okamoto, familiar to genre fans from HBO’s *Westworld* and *The Wolverine* — because he isn’t ambitious enough and keeps taking her for granted. Heartbroken and determined to win her back, Slater jumps when a call comes in from a high-powered Beverly Hills attorney, played with vampy relish by Brooke Shields, who wants him for her elite firm. It’s his chance at the big leagues. There’s just one problem: his original boss at the scrappy storefront practice won’t let him walk away from one last case — a lawsuit against a major pharmaceutical company accused of stealing a medical researcher’s breakthrough allergy compound.
You can see where this is headed. The pharma company Slater is suing at his old firm is the exact company Shields’s firm has been hired to defend. Rather than pick a side, Slater decides to work *both* — throwing on a blonde wig, blue contact lenses, and a fake mustache to pose as an entirely different lawyer at the Beverly Hills firm, while keeping his real identity (and his real best friend, Huntington) on the plaintiff side at the storefront. It’s a classic dual-identity farce in the tradition of old studio comedies, and it’s the kind of setup that gives a deep ensemble cast something to chew on.
And what an ensemble. Brooke Shields is clearly having a ball playing the imperious high-powered attorney type. Sandra Bernhard pops up as a no-nonsense judge whose recurring “order in the court!” bit gives the film its punning title — a nice little wink for anyone who catches it. Luis Guzmán, the man of a thousand scene-stealing supporting roles, is in the courtroom as a chaotic defendant doing what only Luis Guzmán can do. And then there’s Krysta Rodriguez — the Broadway veteran from *First Date* and NBC’s *Smash* — who absolutely *devours* her role as Sue, a sharp associate at Shields’s firm who lands every line with the screwball timing the movie keeps reaching for. If you didn’t know Rodriguez’s work before, *Out of Order!* is the introduction. By the final act, you’ll be looking up her stage reel.
The movie works best when it stays with Routh and Huntington. Watching these two at the tiny law firm — bickering over clients, sharing a coffeepot, trading pep talks between disasters — is a reminder of why they were cast together in *Superman Returns* to begin with. There’s an easy rhythm between them. Routh brings the same earnest, fully-committed energy that made him so lovable in *Scott Pilgrim vs. the World* and on CW’s *Legends of Tomorrow*. Huntington is doing some of the best deadpan work he’s had since his Jimmy Olsen days. Jacobson smartly lets them carry long stretches of screentime together, and the chemistry alone is reason enough to show up for this one.
Where the film occasionally stumbles is in the dialogue. A few scenes tip into characters explaining plot to each other instead of living inside it, and the tonal register can wobble — Bernhard and Guzmán are playing broad courtroom farce while some of the office scenes sit in a more grounded comedy key, and the gears don’t always mesh. A running “weird but cute” bit between Shields and Routh wears out its welcome a scene or two before the movie realizes. But for genre fans and Routh-Huntington completists, these are minor quibbles. *Out of Order!* isn’t trying to reinvent the legal comedy. It’s trying to be the kind of deep-cast, big-swing studio farce that doesn’t really get made anymore — and for long stretches, it succeeds.
Director Guy Jacobson, co-writing with Megan Freels Johnston, is clearly in love with the old-school farce tradition: outlandish plot mechanics, stacked ensemble, a premise that runs on charm. The swing is big. Not every note lands, but the ones that do land well. Superman and Jimmy Olsen back on screen together nineteen years later, a Broadway showstopper stealing every scene she’s in, Brooke Shields in full fun-mode, and Luis Guzmán shouting from the back of a courtroom — that’s a pretty solid Saturday night at the USA Film Festival.
Recommended for Routh fans, Huntington fans, and anyone who misses when studio comedies leaned hard into their cast.
