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75Newly minted celebrity couple Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston don't have many opportunities to demonstrate their romantic chemistry in Peyton Reed's funny, heart-wrenching The Break-Up, but they still give what may be the best performances of their careers.
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75A movie that's smarter than its trailer - in fact, totally different in tone and content? That's news, and it's why The Break-Up is a pleasant surprise to the open-minded.
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75It's easier to accept a breakup when it's clear that the two parties are mismatched, but a better, braver film would reveal what caused the initial attraction.
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67It's an ambitious idea that monkeys with your expectations: make a whole movie about the ugly, hurt-feelings part of the relationship that's usually disposed of in a romantic-comedy musical montage. Unfortunately, like a bad boyfriend, The Break-Up has a problem with consistency.
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63Vaughn and Favreau are so money, just like they were in "Swingers."
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It's Aniston's return to the emotional authenticity that surfaced too briefly in "Friends With Money" and made "The Good Girl" such a revelation.
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63Listening to people bicker for almost two hours wears thin, especially when the comedy is never quite so funny as you had hoped it would be.
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60The Break-Up doesn't turn the rom-com on its head, but with its focus on the darker side of love manages to gently tip it on its side.
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60It's full of pain and quirky characters standing at oblique angles to one another, and while it doesn't add up it held me throughout.
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50Audiences expecting a good time will instead be rewarded with wildly unsympathetic lead characters and uncomfortably long stretches without a laugh in sight.
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50Since the scenes where they're together are so much less convincing than the ones where they fall apart, watching the movie is like being on a double-date from hell.
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50This one has some originality, even though it unfolds like Ingmar Bergman's divorce melodrama "Scenes From a Marriage" - without the marriage.
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50Imagine watching Bergman's "Scenes From a Marriage," except without good scenes, without a marriage (legal or spiritual) and without people worthy of anybody's attention, even each other's. Now imagine something even worse.
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50Done in by its tone.
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50The Break-Up is not comical or romantic, and it's certainly not a date movie. Sitting through it is almost as painful as going through the demise of a relationship.
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50The Break-Up is like Danny DeVito's "The War of the Roses," but without the wit, the acid, and the blacker-than-black humor.
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50Peyton Reed's The Break-Up proves there is nothing particularly funny or charming about two people splitting up, even if the couple is played by Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston.
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50Although possessed of a laudable desire not to be yet another run-of-the-mill, wacky-impediment, I'm-nobody-and-you're-the-Prez's-daughter romance comedy, damned if the picture can figure out how to be an anti-romance comedy.
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50Everybody’s sleepwalking here. Vincent D'Onofrio is fantastic with Vaughn in a small part as his brother, but it's as if he’s running in during a break from "Law & Order: Criminal Intent."
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50The best bits are incidental: Vaughn's chats with Jon Favreau as his bartender buddy, which are delightful interludes of jostling ego, and Judy Davis, looking like Anna Wintour redesigned by Tim Burton as an undead marionette, laying down the law as Aniston's boss.
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A routine, stereotype-stuffed sitcom with pretensions.
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50I'd be happy to see it listed in an in-flight magazine, but "Annie Hall" it's not.
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50The script (by Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender) strains hard after a few easy jokes, and the whole movie feels dull and trivial.
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50With this genial bunch, and the occasional good line, there's no reason not to see The Break-Up, but there's also no reason, assuming the date is going well, not to skip it and order dessert.
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50Sporadic rays of sunshine emanate from the broad and gifted supporting cast, but the core story is almost relentlessly unpleasant, like sitting through a dinner party where the host couple does nothing but bicker.
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42The filmmakers have wildly miscalculated the chemistry these real-life lovers generate on film.
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40While The Break-Up fancies itself the heir apparent to other vindictive failed relationship movies like "Modern Romance" and "War of the Roses," its lead actors lack the comparable appeal to hold our interest
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40The Break-Up doesn't know whether it wants to be a facile, enjoyable date movie or an unnerving examination of the dark, pockmarked underbelly of everything we expect out of romantic relationships, and it settles for a deeply unsatisfying nowheresville.
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40Sadly, The Break-Up is simply an exercise in confusion. To call it erratic would be to imply there was a course it went off, but the film's intentions are impossible to fathom.
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40Is The Break-Up worth your time? Let's put it this way: Whenever Vaughn is onscreen, it is. When he's not, it ain't. The movie's a comedy, but it's also about a breakup, so it gets a bit maudlin toward the end.
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40Nobody likes a fixed fight, except the backroom boys making the deal. Which is why The Break-Up may have its share of laughs, but isn't much fun.
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38There are precious few laughs in this poorly written and directed "unromantic comedy" - the sort of dire date movie you'd take somebody to if you wanted it to be a LAST date.
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38The biggest unresolved question here is why we're paying $9.50, plus popcorn, for something we can presumably get at home for free.
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33If, as the ads would lead you to believe, you go to see The Break-Up expecting a romantic comedy, you will be severely disappointed. If you go to it expecting a good movie, you will also be severely disappointed.
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33A lot of The Break-Up doesn't work. Actually, apart from some funny moments between old Swingers sparring partners Favreau and Vaughn, and a nice scene with Jason Bateman as the couple's realtor, virtually none of it works.
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Faced with a long and miserable road on which they make each other sorry or crazy, both Brooke (Aniston) and Gary (Vaughn) dig in hard on the least appealing parts of their stock characters.
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20It's not a good sign when a movie is called The Break-Up and you can't wait for the couple to split so they'll get some relief from one another, and give the audience some relief from them.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 35 out of 57
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Mixed: 8 out of 57
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Negative: 14 out of 57
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DougF.1Take a 300 pound Vaughn, mix in a washed up actress whose best role was starring in Leprechaun and what do you get? Bad movie!
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