The Break Up
Comedy
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The Break Up” is a comedy that fails to produce laughs as well as likable characters.
One of Hollywood’s most popular couples Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn team up in the comedy “The Break Up.” The movie is about Brooke and Gary (Aniston and Vaughn) who meet at a baseball game and after two years of spending their life together, decide that they are going to break up. Even though they split up neither of them want to give up the condo which is in both their names. So the ex-couple now tries to share the condo and hilarity supposedly ensues…
“The Break Up” is one mess of a movie. All throughout the movie I couldn’t figure out what the director was trying to say. Before I start ripping apart this movie I will admit that I do like Vince Vaughn a lot and while I never thought the trailers for “The Break “up” were amusing, I did find myself quite curious to see how the film was going to end and how Aniston and Vaughn looked together on the big screen.
Seeing that Aniston and Vaughn are a real life celebrity couple you would think that they would have some kind of chemistry on the big screen. This is where the first problem lies because to me neither Aniston nor Vaughn had any on screen chemistry. The acting between the two seemed very forced and unbelievable. Which brings up another issue, none of the characters in this movie are likable. They are all self-centered and very stereotypical. Vaughn’s character Gary plays video games and watches sports all day which granted most guys do but why make his character so stereotypical? And when Brooke breaks up with Gary he can barely move away from the television and doesn’t seem to care. Which leads to the next problem which is the whole break up thing which was really ridiculous. They broke up because Gary didn’t want to help do the dishes??? I mean how unrealistic is that. Maybe if the script developed the relationship more in the beginning, the break up would have seemed more realistic and understandable but it failed to do that.
The next big problem is the subject matter, the fact that “The Break Up” tries to be a slapstick comedy is a big problem. This movie fails at almost every attempt to be funny. I think I may have chuckled once maybe twice but that’s it. The reason why the film isn’t funny is because breaking up isn’t a funny experience at all and while the writers Jeremy Garelick, Jay Lavender, and yes Vince Vaughn himself thought they were creating a creative movie with funny situations almost all the humor in the film failed because honestly who thinks breaking up is funny?
With that being said, the film also tends to be very unbalanced for the first hour and twenty minutes the movie tries to be funny and then about twenty minutes before the movie ends it tries to be serious. I think if the film tried to be serious instead of actually trying to be funny by throwing in stale gay jokes and stupid sex gags it would have been better. The last twenty minutes of the film were decent because it’s the only time in the movie where it shows the emotions of the characters and makes they seem human but by that time the audience doesn’t want to be depressed they want to see something funny which is another reason it fails. It wants to be a dramedy but the drama comes in to play to late in the film and the comedy doesn’t work.
“The Break Up” features a pretty decent cast all of which are poorly used in this film. Vaughn who I normally like just isn’t believable nor do I care about him because he is self centered and uncaring. Aniston who I never really liked as an actress actually again isn’t likable. She seems like such an uncaring character herself in this film. Jon Favreau who I normally like is a very stereotypical and unlikable character. Then you have the so called gay characters played by Justin Long and John Michael Higgins both again who play very annoying and stereotypical gay characters. Lastly Jason Bateman who I really liked is again a very uncaring and selfish character. Even being a big fan of Bateman I still did not like the role he played here. I felt the cast had potential however because of the poor script and directing no one involved came out of the film as being likable.
Director Peyton Reed did a horrible job at directing “The Break Up.” I looked up what he worked on and I think that could be the problem. He is actually a television director and maybe that’s the problem because Reed did not know how to capture emotion nor create a single likable character throughout the movie. He wasn’t able to create laughs nor have the film work out in the end. I felt that his directing was horribly amateurish and he did not do a good job at all with this film.
In the end, “The Break Up” is a huge waste of time and talent. I felt bad for not liking the film because it did try to do something different that no Hollywood movie has tried before but it failed horribly at it. Some things in life aren’t funny and I think breaking up is one of them. The fact that Vaughn and Aniston are dating in real life probably made the film even more unrealistic. There are so many problems with the film from the unlikable characters to the poorly developed script. The movie tries to be funny yet fails and then at the end figures that maybe if we throw in some drama it will save the film from totally sucking but like I said by then everyone is already set to laugh. It’s just a bad movie and for those who want to see it just for Aniston and Vaughn to see if they have good on screen chemistry, I say wait for video because honestly they have none and you will just be mad at yourself for wasting anywhere from $6 to $10 on a ticket for “The Break Up”
MovieManMenzel’s final rating for the Break Up is a 1.5/5. Its tries to be different but fails horribly.
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