I don’t want to oversell “How to Be Single” — it’s a romantic comedy that’s only intermittently funny, cobbling together more storylines and characters that it can bother to keep track of. At the same time, however, it’s a movie that at least occasionally bothers to zag instead of zig, avoiding the sort of pitfalls we’ve come to expect in films about unmarried young ladies on the prowl in the big city.
It’s based on a novel by Liz Tuccillo, and despite the rom-com clichés that the screenwriters have on their collective résumés — Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein collaborated on “Valentine’s Day” and “He’s Just Not That Into You,” while Dana Fox is responsible for “Couples Retreat” and “What Happens in Vegas” — “How to Be Single” dares to reach the final reel without squeezing its quartet of heroines into gold bands and Vera Wang gowns.