‘The Ex’ is half a good film.
It starts off promisingly enough with a gentle tone and a lively and sharp script from David Guion and Michael Handelman.
Zack Braff is Tom Reilly, a New York cook and something of a slacker. His wife, Sofia (Amanda Peet), is a hard driving lawyer but as the film begins she is very pregnant and they are trying to pick a name for the kid.
As is the way with this kind of film, she goes into labor the day he is fired for squirting his obnoxious boss with ketchup.
So the family, now three, pack up and move to Ohio where her father, Bob (Charles Grodin, a welcome return to the big screen after 12 years away), an executive in an ad agency, has offered Tom a job as, “assistant associate creative.”
Turns out the agency is a new-agey kind of place where everyone dresses to fit their mood and throws around an invisible ball when they want to talk in meetings. To make matters worse, Tom’s new boss is Chip (Jason Bateman) a paraplegic, apparently of awesome endowment, who once had sex with Tom’s wife.
In fact, Chip and fate conspire to exacerbate Tom’s feelings of insecurity by ever increasing descriptions of the handicapped Chip’s not so handicapped ways in the sack.
Chip is a sweet faced, outwardly sensitive monster who uses his physical incapacities as a crutch. He uses every trick in the book to tear away at Tom’s self image.
It’s at this point ‘The Ex’ performs the most egregious shark jump of any film this year.
Any wit the film had disappears like a Yuppie dream of early retirement, a victim of panicky plot machination and an increasing failure of inspiration. Tom undergoes a character transplant turning from loving husband and lovable goof into an unfeeling brute. He threatens kids, screams at his wife and comes up with increasingly desperate plans at the office.
He even burns the place down.
The tone changes from light comedy to a revenge sitcom with a resultant coarsening of the humor.
I felt so let down I had problems sitting through the back half of the film.
Braff abandons the shambly doofus character he plays so well in television’s Scrubs to terrorize all who love him. He’s a likeable actor but if he hopes to continue in films he’s got to find a grown up character – a task that eluded him in his other films, ‘Garden State’ and ‘The Last Kiss.’
Peet, a journeyman actor and practiced farceur appears increasingly lost as the film goes on.
Grodin, using all the performance smarts he displayed in much better films (‘Midnight Run,’ ‘Dave’) works hard but manages to generate little humor in the thankless role of the father.
Mia Farrow is wasted as Peet’s mother.
The only one who comes out of this mishmash is Bateman (Arrested Development) whose quiet malevolence never wavers.
If director Jesse Peretz leaves any footprint on all this, it is certainly not discernable.
‘The Ex,’ until recently called Fast Track but since the film has been around for a year or so that title is probably too much of an embarrassment, is another dumped on the market by the Weinstein Company with little buzz and no fanfare. You wonder how often the two one-time Hollywood buzzmeisters can do this and stay in business.
‘The Ex’ will quickly die on the big screen to perhaps find a happier home on DVD.
USA
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