Review of Five Year Engagement

Review of Five Year Engagement

I really like Emily Blunt. I really loathe gag comedy. I’m really indifferent about Jason Segel. Let the battle begin…

This is the long story of a couple trying to stay engaged both in name and in practice. For most of the more than 2-hour long movie, the couple gives us a realistic back and forth about a real couple’s struggles, sacrifices and compromises that gives this viewer hope this will be something real. Then the movie bends to the will of the genre police and becomes that formulaic rom com that Taylor Swift is usually in. Only it’s been cased in all these extraneous scenes clumsily inserted just for laughs, which only makes me angrier that the payoff isn’t there.

Not only does the movie use the formula, but it makes the coefficient unnecessarily high (warning: that was math humor). In the “boy loses girl” phase, Jason Segel bangs his co-worker in the deli (close enough). But he was conflicted, so that makes it OK. And in the “boy gets girl back” phase, they get married in the park in an impromptu ceremony that she planned with a jazz band, all their friends and family and blah blah blah Taylor Swift blah blah blah. This movie could have been good. Instead, it was this. 4 bugs (out of 10)