Or, “Swingers II: How Trent Walker Got His Groove Back."
Once upon a time, in a magical land called Los Angeles, there lived a tall young man named Trent Walker (Vince Vaughn). We didn't really know all that much about him, but we did know that he was charismatic, brash, loud and over-bearing, but he had a good heart and wanted nothing but the best for his friend Mike Peters (Jon Favreau). Eventually, Mike found happiness with a girl named Lorraine, and Trent moved on to Chicago, befriended a bartender that looks like Mike (only bald) and met the girl just right for him.
At least that's the backstory I tagged onto the new film, The Break-Up, since we've seen everything in this film done before, except better. We've seen Vaughn playing the constant talker and we've seen Aniston playing the lead female in yet another paint-by-numbers romantic comedy. (Vaughn's done jazz riffs on Trent Walker when he was in Old School and Wedding Crashers, but this was the first time it really felt like he was Trent, only a few years later.) The only difference here is that, since the movie's called The Break-Up, it's the year's first "anti-romantic comedy."
The film begins at Wrigley Field, where we see Vaughn and Favreau watching a Cubs / White Sox game. (Vaughn's a Cubs fan, Favreau's a Sox fan) After a quick back-and-forth that the two of them do so well – no matter the quality of the script, they'll always have excellent chemistry – Vaughn spots Aniston sitting a few seats away from him (with a date) and immediately starts talking like Trent. He comes onto her more and more until she apparently agrees to go on a date with him. She must have, since the opening credits show the two of them happy together for a long period of time, done to the tune of Queen's "You're My Best Friend."
Of course, since the movie is called The Break-Up, they jump right into the cracks starting to show in their relationship as soon as the credits are over. The tag-line on the posters reads, "Pick a side," but the way the script goes, we're not given any choice. Aniston is the one doing all the work in the relationship, while Vaughn comes home from work and plops down on the couch to watch SportsCenter twenty minutes before their families are scheduled to come over for dinner. And as the film continues, we see that Vaughn's character's just a prick while Aniston's the victim who has to demand that he change or else it's over.
Not only is Aniston doing all the work in the relationship, but she seems to be doing all the work in the film. All Vaughn has to do is start up an argument, while she kick-starts the break-up itself, and then realizes that she pushed him away so she tries to make him jealous so he'll come back. Once the relationship ends, however, Vaughn comes alive and delivers the laughs that he's capable of providing. This helps keep the movie going, but just enough to be mediocre and nothing more. (There's even a pseudo-Swingers moment in a night club with Vince's younger brother, but all that did was made me want to watch Swingers again.)
The supporting characters are nothing but wasted filler. While Favreau and Joey Lauren Adams rise above the script and become the only memorable characters, John Michael Higgins and Vincent D'Onofrio not only fail to add anything to the film, but actually wind up taking away from it. Higgins is the lead singer of an a capella group, and D'Onofrio is Vaughn's older brother and one-third of their tour guide company. Higgins has a couple of funny moments, but his performance pales in comparison to the role he played in A Mighty Wind. D'Onofrio should be so lucky. He spends one complete scene pushing so hard to get a laugh, you would assume the scene lasts about twenty minutes.
I think this pretty much covers it for this film. There's only so much time I can invest in this stale piece of mediocrity before I start to get depressed. The simple fact is that this could have been an anti-romantic comedy on the level of The War of the Roses. But to achieve that level, the writers and director Peyton Reed had to make us feel sympathy for both the man and woman, to make us agree with both of their sides, and to make us feel like this story could literally go anywhere. Less than ten minutes into the film, we're shown that is not what we are going to get, so even though there are just enough laughs to move the audience along at a decent pace, I can't recommend this any higher than a Sunday afternoon viewing on HBO.
The 411: This could have been a damn good comedy if it had bothered to take enough risks. But the lazy script and uninspired performances reduce this film to a time-waster that’s not boring, but not worth spending time watching in a movie theater.
