Our Place Or Mine Is Hideously  Mediocre

Your Place Or Mine(Netflix)

Rating: **

When  charismatic stars like Reese Witherspoon  and  Ashton Kutcher  get together for a romcom, you are  within your rights to expect  some  fireworks.

Your Place Or Mine(now streaming on  Netflix) fizzles  out  in no  time at  all. The storytelling is intolerably bland . The  dish needed serious spicing and peppering. The writer-director thinks placing  its two appealing leads in  two different  cities,  NY and LA, and then making them switch places when  Debbie needs  to be in LA to do a crash course , is  an ingenious ploy to get our attention.

Wrong! Utterly and  unambiguously wrong. Nobody wants to watch Witherspoon and Kutcher talking over the  phone or face-timing one  another  for most of the film. Kutcher plays  a successful New Yorker trying to  play  a successful  helicopter Dad  to a bored teenager Jack (Wesley Kimmel) who probably thought  some weeks  with his  mother away in the care  of  her best friend would liven  up his  life.

But it is one thing to play the  fun dad. To actually BE fun is quite another. Just like the  film which  aspires to be  fun  and wants to  be  a relaxing  place for spectators to rest their weekend weariness.

But sorry, Your Place Is Mine is  a  tired  and tiring concoction with very little room for the  spectator  to get  involved with the  lives  of these bland people. The writing  by debutant  director Aline Brosh McKenna  is  frequently  lazy and  dimwitted. This is  an inexcusable  dumbing-down from the writer of the sharp-witted  The Devil Wears Prada.  Not one line in  Your Place Of Mine  is   divine.

It all seems like  one big excuse to bring the two amiable  lead actors into  a clasp with little or no control  over the material that is meant to  support the star power on display.And honestly,  if it takes  twenty  years for the protagonists  to   get to know that they love one another, it seems just as long for us watch them  coming to their  inevitable  conclusion.

Why is  it that in spite of seeming decently intelligent, many protagonists  don’t see  they they are meant  for one another?

The episodic movement makes the film look like the  last season of  a serial which has had its   day. The climax on the airport  with Reese and  Ashton shouting to  one  another from across the terminal is a salient embarrassment. I  don’t know how  Reese and Ashton will ever justify this  film in their repertoire.