Movie Log: Outsourced

I often say that I like romantic comedies, but what passes for a Hollywood romantic comedy is usually utter crap. What I mean is that I like movies like Outsourced -- only mildly manipulative, and with reasonable facsimiles of human emotion and motivation driving the plot.

Todd Anderson (Josh Hamilton) is a mid-level worker bee in the Seattle call center of a tchotchke catalog when he gets the bad news: his entire department is being outsourced to India. The only bit of good news: he gets to train the new staff, and then his weasely boss, Dave (Matt Smith) will transfer him to a new, stable job back in the US.

The movie doesn't waste much time on this, which is smart -- it's the premise, and we knew that's what it was about from the poster. Todd lands in a small Indian city -- picturesque and backwards as the places cosmopolitans like Todd end up in to learn better always are -- and begins training both the new local head of the call center, Purohit (Asif Basra) and the rest of the staff.

The actual romance plot -- with Asha (Ayesha Dharker) -- takes a long time to get started, so Outsourced seems more like a pleasant fish-out-of-water comedy for most of its length. It does have several of the obvious jokes -- diarrhea more than once -- but isn't too obvious about them.

Outsourced is a nice movie that doesn't try too hard; it might annoy viewers from more cosmopolitan parts of India (and India's immense, so it certainly has tens of millions of people more cosmopolitan than me), but otherwise it's just the thing for a night when you want to see a movie about people who are mostly positive and adult.