The Break-Up Reviews
Top Critic"The Break-Up": A brilliantly uncompromising, often harsh but very accurate examination of a relationship unraveling
Sharp dialogue and detailed observations make it a good deal funnier than you might expect.
It'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.
One seemingly terminal problem with the casting of Ms. Aniston and Mr. Vaughn is that neither of their careers has featured characters who excelled at one-to-one relationships with the opposite sex.
Vince Vaughn kills me. Jennifer Aniston, I think, is underrated as a film actress.
The movie offers nothing funny, just a series of sour situations.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The Break-Up, a grim excuse for a romantic comedy, is basically an hour and 45 minutes spent in the company of two unpleasant people during a miserable time in their lives.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
It's the most interesting spin on domestic strife since Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner were hurling dishes at each other in The War of the Roses.
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| Original Score: 3/4
In short, The Break-Up is too accurate to be light-hearted, too light and flippant to be really romantic.
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| Original Score: 2/5
A romantic comedy that's short on both romance and comedy.
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| Original Score: 2/4
With a movie unwilling to go for the jugular, it's more like the dismal The Story of Us than The War of the Roses.
| Original Score: 1.5/4
I don't know if The Break-Up qualifies as a date movie. But it will serve as a cautionary tale for couples falling in love.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Listening 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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| Original Score: 2.5/4
It might not be the frosted lemon tart that's been advertised for months, but it is solid, satisfying fare -- flecked with humor, grounded in pain.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The Break-Up goes badly wrong. Although possessed of a laudable desire not to be yet another run-of-the-mill, wacky-impediment -- damned if the picture can figure out how to be an anti-romance comedy.
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| Original Score: 2/4
As an off-beat anatomy of a troubled couple, the film almost succeeds. As summer movie fun well, it's not.
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| Original Score: C-
If you really feel the need to be bullied and insulted, just call up your HMO provider or reserve a table at an expensive restaurant.
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| Original Score: 1/4
It doesn't work as a revealing look at relationships or as a consistently funny comedy about the war between the sexes.
| Original Score: C
If 7 Up is the un-cola, consider The Break-Up, -- the un-romantic comedy.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Like so many contemporary movies, The Break-Up doesn't know when to call it quits, and the film finally expires after several false endings.
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| Original Score: C+
The Break-Up mostly just lies there -- alternately adoring and condemning its characters for their puppyish refusal to grow up.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
For the movie to work, we would have to like the couple and want them to succeed. Despite some sincere 11th-hour soul-searching by Gary, we're sorry, but we don't want them back together, we want them to end their misery.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Nobody 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.
It'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.
It is the Mutt & Jeff qualities of Aniston and Vaughn that have the most comic potential. Alas, it goes untapped here.
| Original Score: 2/4
If you value your time and your relationship, don't see this on a date.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The 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.
The Break-Up is a refreshingly different romantic comedy, one that doesn't so much rely on gimmicks as on digging around for genuine feelings.
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
Director Peyton Reed doesn't quite bring the sharpness, litheness and attention to detail he brought to Bring It On and Down With Love to The Break-Up, which is nonetheless alternately funny and painful.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston play a couple on the splits in a desultory modern version of the classic comedies of remarriage of the 1930's and 40's.
| Original Score: 2/5
If, 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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| Original Score: D+
We're not talking Ingmar Bergman here, but suffice it to say that audiences expecting a raucous Vince Vaughn comedy (in the mold of, say, Old School) will find themselves laughing less than they'd hoped.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The Break-Up is too badly fractured to be deemed repairable.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The Break-Up is like an uncomfortable party that you can't wait to leave.
Until a cop-out ending, this is War of the Roses territory, where laughs take no prisoners.
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Watching these likable actors flounder around as they try to save a picture that's not worth saving is, well, depressing.
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| Original Score: C-
The Break-Up fails to freshen the stale news that women are from Venus and men are from Mars.
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| Original Score: 2/4
When they break up, which happens pretty early in this self-professed 'anti-romantic comedy,' it doesn't seem tragic. It just makes sense.
The Break-Up is being marketed as an 'unconventional romantic comedy,' but the only thing unconventional about it is that it's not romantic and it's not a comedy.
| Original Score: 1.5/4
The movie plays like Scenes From a Marriage for 14-year-olds.
Their trademark good guy and girl blow their mutual affability in a dull show of falling apart.
Ill-conceived virtually from the opening frame as a self-described 'anti-romantic comedy.'
After a promisingly quirky start, Break-Up suffers a major breakdown from which it never recovers.
