Review: This rom-com regimen gets good ‘Results’

The rom-com isn’t such a lost cause, after all. It was just waiting for someone like indie filmmaker Andrew Bujalski to resuscitate it.

The inspired result is “Results,” a fresh, dryly funny take on contemporary relationships with Guy Pearce, Cobie Smulders and Kevin Corrigan gamely holding up their ends of one amusing triangle.

Retaining his Australian accent for a change, Pearce plays an idealistic gym owner who has been known to mix business and pleasure with the acerbic Kat (Smulders), a popular personal trainer at Power 4 Life who has terrific form and a short fuse.

Enter Danny (Corrigan), a self-described “pudgy and mellow” recent divorcée with a big inheritance. He summons Kat to his empty Austin, Texas, mansion to help him develop a fitness regimen that will get him to a point where he can take a punch.

It’s inevitable that these three cases of arrested development will become intertwined, but seldom in a way that we’ve come to expect from this genre. Bujalski’s affably quirky script and direction offers plenty of pleasant little revelations, most notably the palpable chemistry among his three terrific leads (Corrigan has his best role in years), plus Anthony Michael Hall as Pearce’s spiritual guru, a gruff Russian kettle bell master.

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“Results”

MPAA rating: R for language, sexual content, drug use.

Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

Playing: Nuart, West Los Angeles.