Break Away

The headliner at the multiplex this weekend, is the Jennifer Aniston/Vince Vaughn anti- romantic comedy, The Break-Up.

It looks like it may be a rough ride for the film though. The reviews for the movie range from just OK to pretty bad. Ben Fritz of Variety sees trouble ahead for sure as Love conquers all…except mutants While Joshua Rich of Entertainment Weekly predicts much the same thing and says that Jen and Vince are no match for the X-Men.

Meanwhile, one of EW's film critics, Owen Gleiberman says in part:

A lot of people will probably want to see The Break-Up, not just for the gossipy potential of its Vaughniston/Brangelina tie-ins but because the concept, which is all there is to the film, hinges on the universality of romantic implosion. We've all dumped and been dumped, and you go to see this movie for the comic jolts of recognition — the eternal war between what men and women want. That's the idea, at any rate. What The Break-Up comes down to, though, is this: Brooke (Aniston), nice and WASPy and generous and tasteful, is a girl-next-door beauty with a classy job at an art gallery; Gary (Vaughn), a Polish prole who gives rambunctious bus tours of Chicago, doesn't do much at home besides sulk and play video games. The movie is structured, in the screwball tradition, as a comedy of remarriage, though we can barely see what these two ever had together. A credit montage depicts their supposedly happy two-year union in a series of photographs, and then we cut to Gary arriving home before a dinner party, toting three lemons; Brooke had asked him to get 12. He objects — to going out and getting more lemons; to the lemon centerpiece she wants to create; to setting the table; to doing much of anything. (Then he disses her cooking.) This doesn't exactly look like a balanced relationship — but, more to the point, it's not a balanced comic situation.

Ultimately giving the film the average grade of C.

Apparently some in the press even see this movie as Aniston's last shot at a successful film career, given the fact that her last high profile film, Derailed, flopped earlier this year.

While I would hardly go that far...If the film's script is as bad as it sounds, at the very least, maybe she should fire the person who told her that yet another romantic comedy would serve her well.