Metacritic reviews

Is The Break-Up worth your time? Let's put it this way: Whenever Vaughn is onscreen, it is. When he's not, it ain't. The movie's a comedy, but it's also about a breakup, so it gets a bit maudlin toward the end.

Audiences expecting a good time will instead be rewarded with wildly unsympathetic lead characters and uncomfortably long stretches without a laugh in sight.

Sporadic rays of sunshine emanate from the broad and gifted supporting cast, but the core story is almost relentlessly unpleasant, like sitting through a dinner party where the host couple does nothing but bicker.

A routine, stereotype-stuffed sitcom with pretensions.

The best bits are incidental: Vaughn's chats with Jon Favreau as his bartender buddy, which are delightful interludes of jostling ego, and Judy Davis, looking like Anna Wintour redesigned by Tim Burton as an undead marionette, laying down the law as Aniston's boss.

The Break-Up is like Danny DeVito's "The War of the Roses," but without the wit, the acid, and the blacker-than-black humor.

Everybody’s sleepwalking here. Vincent D'Onofrio is fantastic with Vaughn in a small part as his brother, but it's as if he’s running in during a break from "Law & Order: Criminal Intent."

Sadly, The Break-Up is simply an exercise in confusion. To call it erratic would be to imply there was a course it went off, but the film's intentions are impossible to fathom.

A lot of The Break-Up doesn't work. Actually, apart from some funny moments between old Swingers sparring partners Favreau and Vaughn, and a nice scene with Jason Bateman as the couple's realtor, virtually none of it works.

Faced with a long and miserable road on which they make each other sorry or crazy, both Brooke (Aniston) and Gary (Vaughn) dig in hard on the least appealing parts of their stock characters.