Film Review: If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

Welcome back to the blog readers. As you may know, I am on my soon-to-be annual marathon of watching all of the Best Picture nominees that I call my "Best Picture Expedition." This year, I have also decided to watch every single acting nominee, which is normally a bit difficult but this year is different. Watching all the Best Picture nominees (and already having seen Weapons (2025)) will get me to seventeen out of the twenty. For the odd three, this is one of the films that is required. Would Rose Byrne deserve her Best Actress nomination? Stick around to find out.

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You was written and directed by Mary Bronstein. The film stars Rose Byrne, Conan O'Brien, Danielle Macdonald, Delaney Quinn, Christian Slater, and Rakim "A$AP Rocky" Mayers. In the film, with her life crashing down around her, a woman named Linda attempts to navigate her daughter's mysterious illness, an absent husband, a missing person, and an increasingly hostile relationship with her therapist.

Personally, I could only go into this film with what everybody else was saying about it. The consensus was that the film was an incredible look at modern parenting with a career-best performance from Rose Byrne and she deserves her Oscar nomination. After popping on HBO Max and watching this film for myself, I have no idea what the hype was all about. The performances to me felt shallow and lacked depth, and the story feels like a weak derivative of Marty Supreme (2025).

I want to start this review by talking about the performances, and the one I want to single out is that of Rose Byrne. Byrne is an actor that has been in the business for a long time, appearing in projects such as 28 Weeks Later (2007), Knowing (2008), Neighbors (2014), and Instant Family (2018). But I unfortunately could not get behind her performance as struggling mother Linda in this film. To me, the performance felt kind of phoned in and did not pack the same emotional punch that Timothée Chalamet did in his film Marty Supreme. It felt disjointed in a lot of places, but there were some moments that I could see some semblance of the Oscar-nominated performance I was hoping for.

Now, I want to take a second to talk about the other performances in this film. Conan O'Brien plays Linda's therapist and comes off as endearing but lazily portrayed. Christian Slater plays Linda's husband and is only physically in the film for the final five minutes but his voiceovers sound so phoned in and lazy. A$AP Rocky is just as careless and lazy as the other performances in this film. And this next sentence is going to make me seem like a terrible person, but I thought Delaney Quinn, who played Linda's daughter, was absolutely annoying. I personally could not get behind any of the other characters either, and it sucks because it is supposed to be a character-driven film.

And now, I want to conclude this post by talking about the story of this film, because I was really left disappointed. Since I did not see any trailers for this film, I really had no idea what to expect when it came to story. But the experience that I got felt so similar and derivative to Marty Supreme (and this film came out before Marty Supreme). This woman goes through this screwball odyssey where everything in her life goes wrong and she believes she was set up to fail, except unlike in Marty Supreme, there is no overarching narrative and no end goal for Linda to achieve, making the end of the film equal parts hollow and confusing.

In conclusion, If I Had Legs I'd Kick You is a noble but failed effort to put a label on modern parenting that wastes a somewhat okay performance from Rose Byrne. Thank you all for reading, and I will see you for the next post.