What do you think of when you hear the word “Cancer”?  Do you think of sports analogies that beat-writers and sports journalists seem to overuse when referring to an unruly athlete?  “He’s a cancer in that locker room.”  Does your birthday fall between June 22^nd and July 22^nd, and automatically think of your horoscope?  Or do you think of the debilitating, uncontrolled growth of abnormal cells in the body that’s claimed so many of our loved ones for generations?

The word “Cancer”, regardless of its context, always seems carry with it a lot of weight and negativity.  So when people would refer to the movie 50-50 as “that Cancer movie”, I really didn’t know what to expect.  Was it a movie in the same vein as 2009’s My Sister’s Keeper, a heart warming movie that was more about an internal family conflict than it was the actual cancer that consumed Sofia Vassilieva’s character?  How about 2001’s sappy romance story Sweet November, a movie so chock full of the genre’s clichés that you could have taken Cancer out of the whole movie and replaced it with something as trivial as “She is taking a job overseas” and it still would have been the same movie.

Well, 50-50 certainly “beat the odds”.  50-50 is a story about a 20-something year old (played incredibly by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a seemingly ordinary man, who goes to the doctor after some back pains, and leaves with news that he has Cancer, and that his odds are 50-50.  Not groundbreaking stuff, but it’s the writing that gives this film its wings.  The character’s dialogue is so good; you sometimes forget you’re watching A-list movie stars playing the roles of everyday regular Joes.  I’ve been a fan of Gordon-Levitt all the way back to his sitcom days on 3^rd Rock from the Sun, and my affinity for his work really took off when he played hopeless-romantic Tom Hansen in 500 Days of Summer.  But something about Gordon-Levitt separates him from the pack of movie stars that usually get the 100-mil budget summer blockbusters.  Maybe it’s his ordinary, but handsome, good looks that make him so “approachable” while watching a movie, but JGL, from the start of the movie, makes you invest immediately in his characters stock, and you just sit there to wait and see how far it rises (and drops, in this case).

A cast that is just as well written surrounds his character.  Seth Rogen plays the best friend and main comic relief in the film.  If you don’t like Seth’s past work, you won’t like him here. I find him hilarious, and his banter with JGL’s character (and everyone else for that matter) really standout in the film and will always make you laugh.  But he’s such a good character because he matters to the story, he wasn’t just written in for comedic relief.  There’s a reason the poster for the movie is of those two with the tagline “It takes a pair to beat the odds.”  Definitely one of my favorite Rogen characters ever.

Anjelica Huston, who plays his mother who defaults to smother-mode once she gets the news while also dealing with her husband’s own debilitating disease of Alzheimer’s, adds another dimension to JGL’s character.  Bryce Dallas Howard plays Gordon-Levitt’s girlfriend who just can’t seem to adjust to the news, and the adorable Anna Kendrick (Up In The Air), plays his too-young therapist.

The only analogy that popped up in my head was when I saw the movie Jarhead in 2005, starring Jake Gyllenhaal.  Without doing much research about it, I went into that movie thinking I was going to see just another “war movie”.  But Jarhead was more than that.  It actually wasn’t about guns or fighting or any kind of physical warfare.  It was the mental warfare we witnessed Jake’s character go through throughout the whole movie, and that film really stood out for me.

So 50-50 is about Cancer, and you never forget that while watching any scene in the movie.  But you won’t see any corny, drawn-out speeches anywhere, no “moments of clarity”, and no cliché’s of “last toasts” or “you only live once” late-night ideas.  50-50 is just plain-old good writing, woven into a sad, funny journey, that will make you leave the theater smiling and turning to your friend saying, “That was pretty good.”

50-50 is in theatres September 30^th.  Highly Recommended!