The Break-Up

Rating: **

When the promotion of a movie inadvertently hinges on the personal lives of it's stars, said movie will either attract the curious or repel the fed up. Truthfully, I don't care about the real life soap opera of 'Brangelina' and 'Vaughniton', except to say that I think we should all let sleeping dogs lie, so to speak. As satirist Bill Maher once said, "Let the two best-looking people in the world have sex with each other. We knew they'd end up together-we've been to high school."

Which brings me to Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston's love connection in The Break-Up, a film that you can see is trying really hard, which makes it all the more disappointing to see it fail. Not 'fail' as in completely unfunny, but rather because it is disappointing - it just should have been funnier.

In The Break-Up, Vaughn plays Gary and Aniston plays Brooke. He runs a bus tour of Chicago business with his brothers; she works in an art gallery. In the prologue, we see them meeting at a Cubs game and after the opening credits three years have passed and they are now sharing an excellent condominium apartment. It's immediately obvious that the situation is strained as Brooke feverishly prepares for a dinner party while Gary watches the sports highlights.

An after dinner fight implodes into a full-blown break-up. Brooke believes that this will force Gary to rethink his selfishness and change his ways, Gary, meanwhile, is completely clueless and simply goes about his daily affairs as if relatively nothing has changed. Of course, things escalate into a nasty tete-a-tete; but at the centre of it all is a feeling that these two love each other, and the question over whether or not they can work it out.

I give Vaughn and Aniston credit; they have genuine chemistry and work very well bouncing of each other on screen, I just wish that they had a better script to work with. So many of their fight scenes come off as just vaguely uncomfortable and really unfunny, because this is not a case of he said-she said, it's case of her being completely right and him just being a complete jerk.

Part of the problem is that Gary and Brooke represent such broad stereotypes: Gary's your typical mocho man with the sports and the video games and the slobbery, while Brooke is perfect example of the put-upon woman, forced to nag her man to even get a monicrum of work out of him. Vaughn's line readings though do end up making Gary really likeable, while Aniston switches from moppy to shrill for the most part.

Better are the supporting performances from Jon Favreau as the best friend, Jason Bateman as the realtor and Vincent D'Onofrio as Gary's older brother. Not so great are Joey Lauren Adams as Brooke's cut-and-run minded married friend, Judy Davis as Brooke's curmudgeon of boss and John Michael Higgin's as Brooke's in denial-in the closet brother. Despite a heroic effort by the actors these were just really awful stereotypes from every nearly every romantic comedy you can think of.

But none of these really awful performers stand as proud as Mr. Cole Hauser as Gary's unfortunately named, younger brother Lupus. Lupus' solution to his brother's predicament is promiscuous sex, of course. He leads Gary to a dance club, compares him to a domesticated cat , and tells him that the best way to get over Brooke is to find a woman that looks like her and use her for sexual gratification. Of all the cardboard cut outs in this film, Hauser is the worst, and between this, The Cave and Paparazzi, it's enough to make me wonder if Hauser even reads the scripts he's sent anymore before signing on.

The best words to describe this movie are one's I overheard while leaving the theatre, "it should have been funnier." Yes, this really should have been funnier because the talent was there, and for the most part they were working well on their own, but it just fails to come together in a fun and satisfying way.

I read a review of this film that compared it to Annie Hall. Now, I'm not sure exactly what "Annie Hall" this critic was referring to, because he surely couldn't have meant the one directed by Woody Allen; that Annie Hall was rich in wit and subtlety, two things The Break-Up could have benefitted from. Unfortunately, it isn't any War of the Roses either, Danny DeVito's 1989 film was so delightfully nasty, but in comparing it to The Break-Up one would have to rename it The Cold War of the Roses.

If it weren't for all the real life drama, The Break-Up might have been a sleeper. It does have some laugh worthy lines and some funny scenes; but it also has an ambition to be something greater and that movie really seems to get away from the filmmakers. Combined with a tacky, eye roll-inducing ending, The Break-Up just doesn't work as well as it should.

After the month of May's Impossible Missions, upside-down boats, secret codes and merry mutants, I will secede that The Break-Up does make a nice change of pace. It's good as a date movie, so long as you're not holding out a lot of hope for the future.