Your Place Or Mine(Netflix)
Rating: **
When charismatic stars like Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher get together for a romcom, you are within your rights to expect some fireworks.
Your Place Or Mine(now streaming on Netflix) fizzles out in no time at all. The storytelling is intolerably bland . The dish needed serious spicing and peppering. The writer-director thinks placing its two appealing leads in two different cities, NY and LA, and then making them switch places when Debbie needs to be in LA to do a crash course , is an ingenious ploy to get our attention.
Wrong! Utterly and unambiguously wrong. Nobody wants to watch Witherspoon and Kutcher talking over the phone or face-timing one another for most of the film. Kutcher plays a successful New Yorker trying to play a successful helicopter Dad to a bored teenager Jack (Wesley Kimmel) who probably thought some weeks with his mother away in the care of her best friend would liven up his life.
But it is one thing to play the fun dad. To actually BE fun is quite another. Just like the film which aspires to be fun and wants to be a relaxing place for spectators to rest their weekend weariness.
But sorry, Your Place Is Mine is a tired and tiring concoction with very little room for the spectator to get involved with the lives of these bland people. The writing by debutant director Aline Brosh McKenna is frequently lazy and dimwitted. This is an inexcusable dumbing-down from the writer of the sharp-witted The Devil Wears Prada. Not one line in Your Place Of Mine is divine.
It all seems like one big excuse to bring the two amiable lead actors into a clasp with little or no control over the material that is meant to support the star power on display.And honestly, if it takes twenty years for the protagonists to get to know that they love one another, it seems just as long for us watch them coming to their inevitable conclusion.
Why is it that in spite of seeming decently intelligent, many protagonists don’t see they they are meant for one another?
The episodic movement makes the film look like the last season of a serial which has had its day. The climax on the airport with Reese and Ashton shouting to one another from across the terminal is a salient embarrassment. I don’t know how Reese and Ashton will ever justify this film in their repertoire.
