The Five-Year Engagement brings to life five full years of all the complexities that may come from any romantic relationship—and I mean five full years. And I mean all the complexities.
The movie, which has a running time of 124 minutes, felt much, much longer.
Produced by Judd Apatow, the movie brings back the duo Nicholas Stoller and Jason Segal in this romantic comedy. Segal co-stars in the film as Tom alongside Emily Blunt as Violet.
Tom, a sous chef on the rise in San Francisco, meets girlfriend Violet on New Year's Eve. A year later the couple becomes engaged and soon after, Violet scores an opportunity to study for her doctorate in psychology at the University of Michigan.
So the lingering—at times, quite depressing—engagement begins as Violet focuses on her career while Tom struggles to make it in the Midwest.
While the movie takes into consideration the various obstacles relationships can bring—jobs, goals, family, etc.—it fails to bring back the peaks of laughter audiences reached while watching Stoller and Segal’s 2008 hit Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
Instead, Five-Year takes audiences on a colorless ramble of everything that could go wrong in a relationship.
As an Asian-American, I also had one other annoyance with the movie: a character named Ming who plays the stereotypical, nerdy Asian with broken English. The character is a conventional and poor stereotype and shows the writers failed to have enough wit to produce something more original, and truly amusing.
The Five-Year Engagement isn’t worth your money. Deep six it.
The Five-Year Engagement comes out Friday and is rated R.
