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Tuesday, April 24, 2012
MOVIE REVIEW
The Five-Year Engagement
Before "I Do": Four Funerals And A Wedding
Emily Blunt as Violet and Jason Segel as Tom in "The Five-Year Engagement".
Glen Wilson/Universal Pictures
by
Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com
FOLLOW
Tuesday,
April 24,
2012
You can't blame these souls for leaving their hearts in San Francisco,
and throughout Nicholas Stoller's "The Five-Year Engagement", you sense that the
City By The Bay is beckoning them. In this Judd Apatow co-produced comedy
a year after meeting at a costume party Tom (Jason Segel) and Violet (Emily Blunt) get engaged by the moonlit night of
San Francisco's Bay Bridge and Embarcadero. Things are looking good.
For Violet, a psychology graduate, a Berkeley scholarship for teaching seems
likely but instead Michigan beckons. Violet transitions to colder climes
as a grad teacher and Tom, a top chef at a San Francisco restaurant, gives up
his job to help his fiancé realize her dreams. He takes a lower paying
job. He isn't happy, but he bears both it and Violet's mentor (Rhys Ifans),
who has ulterior motives. Surrounded by awkward friends who have a shotgun
wedding, Violet and Tom find themselves still unmarried, prodded and pressured
by their parents and grandparents, with some of the latter dropping like flies
in a punch line that comes close to running stale.
In a field of utterly brainless romantic comedies in Hollywood there have been
some standouts ("crazy, stupid, love."), and while "The Five-Year Engagement",
full of characters in both Tom and Violet's work lives, isn't exactly stand-out
material, it is a whole lot better than many of the recent films of its genre,
and manages to entertain deep into its second hour. Mr. Segel does well as
the anguished Tom, and occasionally Mr. Stoller (whom with his male lead star
wrote the film -- gets to cut underneath this film's surface, allowing Tom and
Violet to dalliance in messy waters of temptation, some of it unexpectedly
visceral and uncomfortable.
The twists and turns of these two independent people are accompanied by some
awkward gallows humor but "The Five-Year Engagement" which features a versatile
Emily Blunt effortlessly at home in a mainstream American comedy, is hardly a
disappointment. The film, populated with a diverse cast that includes
Kevin Hart ("Think Like A Man", "35 And Ticking") and Mindy Kaling ("No Strings
Attached"), is full of color and life but also packed with drab, cold and harsh
moments. Mr. Hart is given his day in the sun, and his energy and
enthusiasm keeps the film from running off the rails.
"The Five-Year Engagement" has big ambitions, fulfilling some of them and
narrowly missing the target on others but the film's heart, enterprise and
landscape, full of picturesque views of the city I love and live in, wins you
over, and not for lack of trying.
With: Chris Pratt, Alison Brie, Jacki Weaver, Lauren Weedman, Mimi Kennedy,
David Paymer, Randall Park, Dakota Johnson.
"The Five-Year Engagement" is rated R by the Motion Picture Association Of
America for sexual content and language throughout. The film's running
time is two hours and four minutes.
COPYRIGHT 2012. POPCORNREEL.COM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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