It ought to have been perfect. Everygirl meets Everyfratboy, their collective likeability bolstered by an off-screen romance and sympathy garnered from the Brangelina fallout. Finally, we thought, Jen’s found a vehicle to properly showboat with her finely attuned comic skills. She and Vaughn tear strips off each other while Jon Favreau quips like it’s 1996. Go Vaughniston! Can’t fail, right?
Wrong. On paper The Break-Up may look like the kind of frisky romp one would, in decades past, expect to find jollied along by Rock Hudson and Doris Day. But on paper, even Rob Schneider movies can seem like a good idea. Far closer to Bergman’s Scenes From A Marriage than Pillow Talk, The Break-Up wastes comic potential in favour of relentless, monotonous miserabilism. In a better world, it would all be in French and soundtracked by a collaboration between Morrissey and E.
Playing gender differences by rote, Peyton Reed’s film manages to fiercely depress while retaining all the depth of an August puddle. The action, such as it is, sees Jen and Vince hook up, only to implode amidst the ill-tempered clichés. She likes ballet. He likes sports. She likes table centrepieces made from lemons. He likes Playstation. Cohabitants in a Chicago apartment, they’re stuck together as the recriminations and revenge plays escalate. She goes on a date. He, in the movie’s vilest scene, calls in Mr. Favreau and the strippers.
Perhaps there is a place for painful cinema of this nature. Perhaps the endless “You said x/And you said y” exchanges are intended to be cathartic. But if I need to painfully contemplate the human condition, Jen and Vince will never be my first port of call.
I wanted laughter and people getting socked in the crotch, not dreary auto-therapy and a tortured boyfrienderectomy. Bitter break ups may be a universal experience, but so is diarrhoea, and I don’t see A-listers queuing up to make that movie.