The Five Year Engagement
- Year:2012
- Rating:MA
- Director:Nicholas Stoller
- Cast:Emily Blunt, Rhys Ifans, Jason Segel
- Release Date:May 03, 2012
- Distributor:Universal
- Running time:124 minutes
- Film Worth:$3.00
- FILMINK rates movies out of $20 - the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Given the credentials of the talent involved, this is a monumental disappointment featuring charmless characters and a screenplay devoid of laughs or wit.
With 2008's Forgetting Sarah Marshall, debut director, Nicholas Stoller, and writer/star, Jason Segel, crafted a close-to-perfect romantic comedy: raunchy, unpredictable, emotionally honest, gut-bustingly funny, and filled with flawed but loveable characters. Since then, Stoller and Segel have been separately involved with terrific projects like Get Him To The Greek, I Love You, Man and The Muppets, which they co-wrote. All of which makes their star-director reunion on the close-to-execrable, The Five-Year Engagement, so monumentally, maddeningly and depressingly disappointing.
The strengths of Segel and Stoller's previous work (both separately and together) has been that their characters have always been relatable and real, but utterly charming despite their many human failings. In The Five-Year Engagement, we get the relatable and real, but none of the charm. Successful chef, Tom (Segel), and aspiring academic, Violet (Emily Blunt), are cloyingly in love, but keep putting off their wedding, which puts their relationship in stasis, and cracks slowly start to form. From there, the film moves painfully slowly through a cycle of mutual disappointment and humiliation, as the couple move from San Francisco to Michigan to accommodate Violet's new job. Apparently, there are no restaurants in Michigan, so Tom has to work in a sandwich shop, leading him into a tedious early mid-life crisis, which involves hunting and growing a stupid beard.
Along with the unlikeable central characters (Blunt is a fine actress, but her innate frostiness makes Violet seem like even more of a self-obsessed shrew, while Segel is just a sloppy mess), the film is also horribly inconsistent (Segel's best friend, played by Chris Pratt, is alternately moronic or wise, depending on the film's narrative needs, while out of nowhere, his mother reveals herself to be a foul mouthed comic force to rival Lenny Bruce), grossly over-long, excessively and inappropriately improvised, mawkish and consistently irritating. Don't save the date for this one.
