The Break-Up: Critic Reviews

This one, in every sense, is fake.

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.

This is that branch of the romantic comedy known as 'a relationship movie', but generally short on witty lines and amusing incidents.

If you value your time and your relationship, don't see this on a date.

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.

The Break-Up mostly just lies there -- alternately adoring and condemning its characters for their puppyish refusal to grow up.

Their trademark good guy and girl blow their mutual affability in a dull show of falling apart.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If 7 Up is the un-cola, consider The Break-Up, -- the un-romantic comedy.

The movie plays like Scenes From a Marriage for 14-year-olds.

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.

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.

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.

The Break-Up is like an uncomfortable party that you can't wait to leave.

As an off-beat anatomy of a troubled couple, the film almost succeeds. As summer movie fun well, it's not.

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.

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.

Ill-conceived virtually from the opening frame as a self-described 'anti-romantic comedy.'

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.

In short, The Break-Up is too accurate to be light-hearted, too light and flippant to be really romantic.

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.