This whole movie isn't big enough for the both of them
dir: Jay Roach
2025
I really wonder what Americans think British people are. Watching a film like this makes you think Americans think Brits are like these polite but profane aliens who don’t really physically exist in the same world as them, but they have those delightful accents, so what’s not to like?
Olivia Colman and Benedict Timothy Carlton “Cumbersomely Named” Cumberbatch are probably great actors who have been great in all sorts of things. They are, shall we say, less than great here. They are game, they’re trying, you can tell they’re trying, but this script, the stuff these Americans make them do in order to amuse other Americans…ugh. It’s ugly.
It’s ugly and unpleasant, and pretends constantly that it’s not, and they play terrible people, so I question how anyone thought this was going to work. I mean, I have no doubt people saw this flick, as in, might have even bought tickets and such, popcorn, the works, maybe on a date night out. Why didn’t they release it around Valentine’s Day, I’m sure some marketing genius is lamenting?
But, fucking hell. I know that the story is based on a book, and I know they made an earlier movie from it starring Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas, and I remember watching that movie, back in the day, when I was still a kid. A young, impressionable kid. I can’t lie I hated that fucking film too, but at least that had some good actors in it. Good American actors, that is.
The novelty was that these two people had starred in these moderately successful romantic action flicks, Romancing the Stone and Jewel of the Nile, in which Danny De Vito was also along for the ride, and then the thought was to have a flick where Turner and Douglas play a couple whose divorce gets messy and murderous. Ha ha, so funny, and De Vito can direct and play the third wheel!
I think what I really hate about these kinds of flicks, ones that pretend to be about the breakdown of a relationship or a marriage, is just how inherently dishonest they are. There’s nothing even vaguely hilarious about intimate partner violence, domestic violence, people trying to kill each other. It happens every day. Every week in Australia a woman is murdered by her partner or her former partner. That’s not to ignore the countless thousands of people who endure physical and emotional abuse, threats to murder, threats to suicide, every awful permutation possible, each and every day. Not exclusively women at the hands of men, but the vast majority being women on the receiving end.
In dramas like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, or the classic Kramer versus Kramer, they just yell at each other a lot, saying awful things, but they’re not threatening each other with violence or death. And I guess that’s meant to be more realistic or relatable (to audiences who have no direct experience of it), and thus more palatable. But a flick like this, which takes attempted murder and threats of grievous bodily harm and makes it a fucking joke, it makes me a bit sick to my stomach at just how disingenuous it all is.
The film starts with a couple in couples therapy as they list all the things they hate about each other. Then they use words to describe each other that Americans would never be able to use in a flick like this with as much frequency, then they laugh and everything’s great, even though the therapist tells them they’re a lost cause.
The flick then backtracks to show how this implausible couple came to be in California, how they came to resent each other, and how they ended up in the therapist’s office whose advice they ignored before they went even more insane and tried to humiliate and eventually kill each other over who gets the house in the settlement.
There’s a guy in court this week, in Ballarat, in the Supreme Court, just 23 years of age, who murdered his ex-girlfriend, tried to moronically stage it as a suicide by burning her car after strangling her, and I’m wondering; who plays him in the wittily satirical remake? Timothy Chalamet? Paul Mescal? Josh O’Connor? What bon mots the script will have, as the months and years of coercive control and abusive behaviour play out for our fucking amusement?
Oh, how we’ll laugh, apparently.
I have no doubt that Bumscore Cumbersplatch and Oblivia Goalman get along like a house on fire when the cameras aren’t rolling, but this wretched movie has them saying horrible things while grinning like idiots at each other and then immediately, in the next scene acting like nothing just happened. The crappy cascade of scenes can proceed as if nothing happened, even as it works towards a cataclysmic level of violence as they decide, more and more, that potentially murdering their spouse or ex isn’t as repugnant an idea as they’d thought previously.
What doesn’t make this relatable, on any level, is the stuff they try to incorporate into the story which is meant to be reasonable. Sacrificing one’s career in order to look after kids is a real thing that real people do. After experiencing a professional set back at work, changing the work / home dynamics to best suit people’s needs and their kid’s needs is a real thing that people do. Resenting your partner because they get to be professionally fulfilled while you’re stuck at home looking after kids and doing all the chores as your partner jets off to San Fransisco and drinks champagne with David Chang, whoever the fuck he is, maybe is a real thing, regardless of gender.
Films keep depicting men as primary caregivers as being full of resentment towards their partners, as if the wave of societal changes and expectations has forced legions of men to stay home and look after kids, even though, at least in Australia, three per cent of households have men staying home as the primary carer, as the mother works outside the home to support the family.
Three per cent. I’m not trying to minimise people’s lived experience, but that’s not a lot of people dwelling within their statistical insignificance. Surely it’s not enough to justify trotting out this kind of trite bullshit that implies an architect, having massively fucked up a building design that improbably is destroyed (during a destructive hurricane), would be horribly unfulfilled by having to look after his own kids.
To get back at his wife at an early point, he regiments the kid’s lives so that they’re constantly working out and running and doing exercise and presumably eating nothing but healthy stuff, which on the surface seems like a good thing, but its real purpose is to get them out of the way, as they’re sent to some academy in Miami on the other side of the country. You need them out of the way because when a couple descends into comical domestic violence, you don’t want the kids around when you’re shooting at each other, because that would be unseemly.
So the kids aren’t really characters, they’re tokens and props, to be moved around, out of the way when inconvenient. Because this is a comedy, apparently. You don’t want audiences thinking about the children, so many children, who are deeply and irrevocably damaged by domestic violence, not just as witnesses, but sometimes as victims and perpetrators, too, because that would be inconvenient. Messy. Uncomfortable. Icky.
Americans like Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon stand around with little to do other than look embarrassed for these grand thespians, these celebrated raconteurs and award winning bon vivants, these wonderful British people. They have nothing to do other than look foolish, or, on McKinnon’s part, make unrequited sexual statements aimed at Balderdash Cabbagepatch, and I almost feel worse for them than the central two, but not that much worse. They collected a paycheck, they knew what they were doing, just like those appalling stand-up fucks who took cheques to perform at the Saudi “comedy” festival in Riyadh recently. They’re all complicit in this atrocity as well.
This is me being really optimistic – there is a version of this that could have worked. There is a version of this script that could have made these characters human and relatable and believable, maybe. But the characters are such horrible people who do horrible things when the script tells them to, and in the end it doesn’t matter anyway because, well, let’s just say the ending is the same as the film from the 80s, but for way dumber reasons. None of this stuff spontaneously becomes funnier just because of their delightful accents.
Rarely do you watch a film and think the kids and the world would be better off if the main characters of the flick ceased to exist.
I will say that I got exactly one laugh out of this flick, and it’s when, to spoil what little pleasures await any potential viewer, Bumberclot seductively says “How about a three hour circular argument that goes nowhere?”, and I admit it was a big laugh. These are accomplished performers; I just wish that the material was of a quality to match their talents.
Other than that, there is absolutely nothing positive to take from this experience. An almost total waste.
1 time I haven’t watched an alleged rom-com dramedy as bad as this since I Give Them a Year out of 10
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“I don’t think you have the capacity to fix your problems” – what every couple longs to hear from their therapist - The Roses
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