The Ex review

Zach Braff's natural, easy-going charm was the most engaging feature of Garden State and the over-looked but equally terrific The Last Kiss. It is a testimony to his appeal that he emerges from this abysmal mess relatively unscathed. Directionless and witless, The Ex muddles along from one cringe-inducing moment to the next before petering out rather than ending.

Its most glaring misstep is that at times the cast appears to be in different movies. While Braff takes his usual low-key approach, others, in particular Jason Bateman in the title role, resist no opportunity to ham things up. And poor Amanda Peet spends most of the time with the perplexed air of someone who doesn't know what she's supposed to be doing and wondering how she found herself there in the first place.

When we first meet them, Tom (Braff) and Sofia (Peet) are living in New York and expecting their first baby. Sofia has abandoned her successful career as a lawyer with Tom promising to support them. Trouble is, his surly attitude insures he rarely stays in a job for long. On the day she delivers their baby, Tom is fired from his job as a chef, so the three of them move back to her hometown in Iowa where Tom takes up the long-standing offer of working at an advertising company with her father Bob (Charles Grodin).

A fellow colleague at the firm is Chip (Jason Bateman), a wheelchair-bound bitter egomaniac who once slept with Sofia and is still clearly in love with her. Chip's jealousy causes him to sabotage things for Tom at work and with her family, undermining Tom's relationship with Sofia. The majority of the attempted humour in The Ex is of the mean-spirited and dumb variety. Scriptwriters David Guion and Michael Handelman rely too heavily on the tact of having Tom make social gaffs. At best it's an uncomfortable and cheap humour at worst it's just plain annoying.

Director Jesse Peretz fails to apply any cohesion or focus to proceedings, with the result The Ex strikes a dissonant chord. Were it either to take the over-the-top stupid Will Ferrell-esque approach or rein things back, it might have been more successful, but ultimately The Ex's conflicted and confused course is its undoing. The fact that it's painfully unfunny doesn't help either.

Kevin Murphy