The Break-Up

The Break-Up
Studio: Universal Pictures Distribution
Rated: PG-13
Cast: Vince Vaughn, Jennifer Aniston, Jon Favreau, Joey Lauren Adams, Ann-Margret
Director: Peyton Reed
WorkNameSort: Break-Up, The
Our Rating: 1.50
This date movie from hell inaugurates the new cinematic genre of the unromantic noncomedy ‘ or unromnoncom, if you will. Director Peyton Reed (Down With Love) shows us Jennifer Aniston meeting a simply enormous Vince Vaughn at a baseball game, then zooms right past the presumed salad days of their relationship to rejoin them as pissed-off cohabitants more ready to give up on their relationship than on the shared condo they both covet. (Moral: Learning to love real estate is the greatest love of all.) With nothing genuine invested in either character, we can focus fully on how bland and churlish they are, and how their ridiculously depressing squabbling makes the movie feel like an endless suicide note written by the world’s worst coffeehouse poet. Go figure: Online apologists have praised The Break-Up as a ‘frank, realisticâ?� indie in the guise of a studio comedy, which is apparently the 21st-century way of saying a picture sucks.

This article appears in Jun 7-13, 2006.