(Potential spoilers below)

You would have to be a hermit to not believe US comedian Amy Schumer was extremely confident about her new film Trainwreck. There have been enough advanced screenings for the film this weekend alone to argue that it’s supposed “July 30” release date is all a ruse.

The film follows the hijinks of party-girl Amy (Schumer), whose carefree lifestyle of drinking and hooking up any man she pleases is challenged when she begins a relationship with sports doctor Aaron Conners (Bill Hader).

Having caught the film just last night, I can tell you that with her brilliant writing, Schumer has good reason to be confident, but only for its first hour.

This is not a review for Trainwreck, this is a desperate plea to any aspiring writer hoping to create the next years “hit” romantic-comedy, please try and go outside the formula. Whilst the film begins with snappy and consistently hilarious situations and dialogue, it then falls into a tired and worked-to-death screenplay recipe in its second half. That is, girl meets boy, girl and boy fall in love, girl and boy drift apart, girl and boy end up together in a firework ending. For the sake of its release being next week, it would be cruel of me to further divulge into how Trainwreck uses and abuses this formula. Needless to say, there was an audible collective groan throughout the audience when they were able to pick up where the story was going, a place they had seen a story go hundreds of times before.

Compared to the countless other romantic comedies who follow this same template, what makes Trainwreck so painful to watch in its damnation is the fact that we all thought it was different. With Schumer being a modern feminist who presents an accurate portrayal of what a real three-dimensional human being looks like in the 21st century (as opposed to the sort of female cardboard cutouts Michael Bay might deliver), I for one felt like Trainwreck could and should have had the courage to go against the flow. Alas, like a politician crumbling under the lure of Gina Rinehart donations, Schumer has been forced to retreat into the realm of nothing-new, never letting Trainwreck transition from a good film to a great one.