Tampa Film Fan

film fan finding:the break-up

The Break-Up is one of those movies where the preview is just as good as the actual film. In the preview you get to see most of the funny parts without having to sit through the dumb and/or not-so-funny parts. The Jennifer Aniston character is a successful, beautiful woman who works in a Chicago art gallery, wears beautiful clothes and is annoyed by her live-in boyfriend, played by Vince Vaughn. The Vince Vaughn character is the co-owner of a successful tour guide business who likes to sit around the house playing video games and drinking beer with his buddies. Their incompatibility (and Vaughn’s spoiled, selfish behavior) causes them to break up, but their investment in their condo causes them both to continue to live there while trying to force the other person to move. She embarks on a series of first dates to make him jealous; he buys the pool table he’s always wanted for the dining room. And so on.

Interesting enough plot, but it’s ruined by several things. The Vince Vaughn character is so obnoxious, so annoying, so rude and thoughtless that he deserves to get dumped. When he seems to start learning a lesson from all of this, it’s too late. You don’t care. You never believed that the relationship between two such ill-matched people was possible, and now you want them to just sell the damn condo and move on.

Aniston and Vaughn are better and funnier when they’re mad at each other, so you never really want them to get back together. It’s still hard to think of Aniston as anyone other than Rachel from Friends, and she’s so overly bronzed, sculpted and wrapped in tight clothes that you wonder why she ever moved in with Vaughn’s loutish character in the first place.

Wait til The Break-Up comes out on DVD and then rent it as part of a chick-flick marathon.

Film Fan Finding: B