This is Where I Leave You  (2014)    43/100

Rating :   43/100                                                                     103 Min        15

The most notable disaster per capita of famous actor since ‘The Big Wedding‘, this close up look at a large family, brought together by the passing of the father, each of whom all have their problems and secrets suffers primarily from the fact it is enormously difficult to like any of them, this, coupled with their individual and co-operative inability to generate any comedy at all, renders the film all but pointless. Jonathan Tropper wrote the screenplay based on his own novel of the same name and Shawn Levy directs – who has a very varied back catalogue, including the likes of ‘The Internship‘, ‘Real Steel’ (11), ‘Night at the Museum’ (06) and ‘Cheaper by the Dozen’ (03), but this most certainly falls into his duds category, bruising by way of collateral damage Jason Bateman, Adam Driver, Jane Fonda, Tina Fey, Rose Byrne and Timothy Olyphant. The title comes from the reasonably central event that sees Bateman’s character at the beginning of the film walk in on his wife cheating on him with his boss, and he then tries to process this fairly major setback to happily ever after – but the problem is he reacts in such a non-emotional way, with a sort of cold inevitability, and his character is the same one he always plays now, the ‘calm and sensible one’ surrounded by more headstrong or carefree family members/friends, and of course the young local hottie (Byrne) will naturally take sympathy on him, groan. It’s all as unrealistic and stoic as his character is.

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