Your Place or Mine – Film Review

Peter and Debbie are the best of friends and complete opposites. While her son thrives on variety in New York, she desires routine with him in LA. They learn what they think they desire might not be what they actually need as they trade homes and lives for a week.

Your Place or Mine by Aline Brosh McKenna offers an idea that I’ve honestly never seen before in a romantic comedy, and that’s the best compliment I can give it. The main pair in this movie aren’t these two lovers who go out to clubs and take long walks before collapsing into a wonderful, cosy bed; instead, they maintain a long-distance relationship.

While not the most prevalent kind of relationship, long-distance relationships do exist and they are quite challenging, thus I wish more romantic comedies would address this issue. Even when you are unable to physically be there for someone, you still need to be there for them.

While I have the utmost respect for the idea behind Your Place or Mine, the way it was carried out was dreadful. It attempted to depict the ups and downs that being in this kind of relationship entails. This is a rom-com that, as the credits start to roll, you’ll wish you’d never seen because it is completely devoid of all charm and magic. A little over two hours of your life are lost to you forever.

The fact that Ashton Kutcher and Reese Witherspoon have absolutely awful chemistry together and that the main coupling is extremely uninteresting are two of the main reasons why this movie flops as miserably as it does. Seriously. They always seem so forced and weird in every situation. I’m left wondering why these two were chosen as the leads as there is obviously no chemistry between them.

We don’t buy them as a pair because of how awkward the two of them are, which causes some of the emotional passages in the movie to fall flat. Neither their absolute worst nor their absolute greatest are shown to us. They are only sort of a couple. We are expected to support them as a result, I suppose?

The studio simply decided to release it and hoped that within a few weeks everyone would forget about it; and that’s exactly what will happen. The whole thing just seems like one huge cash grab that the studio didn’t care about. When will these very dull, clichéd calamities come to an end?

Ashton Kutcher and Reese Witherspoon have dreadful, forced chemistry in Your Place or Mine, which lacks any kind of charm or magic.