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88As in last year's "Bridesmaids," an authentic, dimensional human element animates the jokes and the characters with whom we spend a couple of highly satisfying hours.
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83A lovely, sweet, funny, romantic, and supremely worthwhile endeavor that unfortunately takes longer to wrap up than it should.
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83A lively, original, and scattershot-hilarious ramble of a Judd Apatow production.
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80As for Violet, Emily Blunt brings to the role genuine sympathy, and she continues to thaw out the ice-queen hauteur of her earlier movies.
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Jun 17, 201280Another solid hit from Planet Apatow - charming, funny and remarkably in tune with real life.
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Apr 27, 201280Feels poignant and real in a way few raunch comedies are.
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80Perhaps the best thing about The Five-Year Engagement is that it signals a touch of maturity creeping into the House of Apatow.
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80Blunt has never been more relaxed, and she and Segel have a believably warm chemistry. It's also nice to find a romantic comedy with so much respect for both its leads.
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78Stoller and Segel don't shy away from rational, relatable adults, which may be an unsexy selling point for a romantic comedy, but that attention to authenticity elevates the likable, low-stakes The Five-Year Engagement.
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75I was expecting something raunchier. Instead, what we have here is a wistful, somewhat overextended but occasionally sweet comedy about a couple that can't – in more ways than one – quite get it together.
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75It makes you laugh and eagerly wish for a happy ending without any preachy soul-searching. As a bonus, it's got a Van Morrison-friendly soundtrack, and the trailers haven't revealed the best parts.
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75It might not have as many gut-busting laughs as "Bridesmaids,'' but there are still plenty - and for once in Apatow's phallocentric universe, most of them don't come at the expense of female characters.
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75For the most part, The Five-Year Engagement has charm and emotion.
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75It's not impossible to address grown-up issues of commitment, of responsibility, of love, and have some fun, and some profanity, while you're at it.
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75The film proves that neither gross-out gags nor pseudo-sophisticated Woody Allenisms are necessary to make a smart, funny comedy.
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70It's a seize-the-day movie, even though the day is a long time coming. [7 May 2012, p.80]
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70A charming, funny, reactionary mating comedy.
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70The Five-Year Engagement dutifully hits the marks of its genre, but it is also about the unpredictability of life and the everyday challenges of love. The sensitivity and honesty with which it addresses those matters is a pleasant surprise.
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Apr 26, 201270The Five-Year Engagement is, for a movie in which a guy fakes an orgasm and (in a separate incident) stuffs a dead deer in his car's sunroof, very grown-up.
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70Nicholas Stoller and Jason Segel's latest collaboration offers a more relatable rom-com scenario while generating laughs that should still satisfy "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" fans.
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63The problem is one of tone. The Five Year Engagement, despite its serious thesis, tries desperately to be funny. Some of the comedic material provokes laughter and some doesn't, but nearly all of it feels wrong.
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63There are enough F-bombs, a couple of chopped-off appendages and a flash of gratuitous male nudity to earn an R rating. But fans of producer Judd Apatow would expect nothing less.
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63I liked The Five-Year Engagement, and then I didn't, and then I did.
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63Drags and sags at 124 minutes. Luckily, the movie never runs on sitcom empty. How could it, with a terrific cast.
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63Five-Year Engagement alternates between realistic scenes of couples bickering and broad character farce, and the two halves mesh uneasily.
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60Unfortunately, stretching things out dilutes the charms of Segel and Blunt, which are considerable.
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50Apatow hates leaving anything on the cutting room floor. You could excise entire chunks of The Five-Year Engagement - the donut experiments at college, a couple of wise soliloquies, most of the stuff involving Violet's sister (Alison Brie) - and never miss a beat.
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50Where "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" frolicked on the beach, this amiable but underachieving comedy just sort of blobs on the couch.
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50A lot more cutting would have made this movie much funnier – but it should have taken place in the editing room, not on the screen.
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50In many ways, "Engagement" reflects both the best and worst of Stoller and Segel's creative collaborations.
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50The story starts out well, then becomes contrived and goes on too long.
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50Comedy means different things to different people, but I'm pretty sure that most everyone agrees that it's best when it's quick and funny. The Five-Year Engagement is neither.
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Apr 19, 201250It puts Emily Blunt in a wedding dress, which will appease the hopeless romantics in the house, even while making the institution of marriage seem ridiculously obsolete.
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40Five-Year has comic bloat. Virtually every character gets their own moment of stand up, but in most cases, the bits aren't funny enough to warrant the screen time.
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Apr 25, 201240It's the sheer lack of investment one feels for the couple that truly sabotages the film.
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40There is exactly one unexpected moment in the otherwise drearily predictable The Five-Year Engagement that, though little more than a throwaway line, at least adds a bit of political reality to puncture Nicholas Stoller's limp, hermetic comedy of deferred nuptials.
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40This is the same old safe, sappy movie that shows up on TBS every weekend.
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20Sometime around what I guessed to be the one-hour mark in The Five-Year Engagement, I checked my watch and honestly thought the battery had given out. Five years doesn't begin to tell the interminable tale.