Your Place or Mine

Directed by Aline Brosh McKenna, Your Place or Mine follows lifelong friends (Reese Witherspoon’s Debbie Dunn and Ashton Kutcher’s Peter Coleman) as they swap apartments for a few weeks and eventually realize that they’re in love with one another. It’s a perfectly reasonable setup that’s employed to periodically passable yet predominantly forgettable effect by McKenna, as the filmmaker delivers an often distractingly slick romcom that’s been suffused with some of the genre’s hoariest, most overused attributes and elements – which, when coupled with Florian Ballhaus’ egregiously bright and colorful cinematography (ie the movie generally resembles a garden-variety commercial), paves the way for a midsection that contains exceedingly little for the viewer to embrace or get excited about. And although the charismatic leads possess plenty of chemistry together, Your Place or Mine‘s arms-length atmosphere ensures that it becomes more and more difficult to work up a rooting interest in their inevitable coupling – which, when coupled with a distinctly, disastrously overlong running time, ultimately does cement the picture’s place as a generic and personality-free romantic comedy that feels like it could (and should) be so much better.

** out of ****