‘Your Place or Mine’ Review – The Answer Is ‘Skip it’

(Click here for the audio version of this review or scroll to the bottom)

There are good movies, then there are ones that are so bad they are good, and some are just terrible with no redeeming quality, like the 2023 romantic comedy ‘Your Place or Mine’. If I had to compile a list of ‘Top 10 Most Boring Romantic Comedies of All Time’ this title would be right up there. Unfortunately, I chose to watch this with two of my closest girlfriends on a Friday night and set the pace for a sorry weekend. Did nobody on the team watch this slow-burn abomination?

Directed and written by Aline Brosh McKenna, the film stars Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher as best friends Debbie and Peter who swap cities/homes for a week as Peter volunteers to look after Debbie’s teen son so she can crash at his Manhattan flat to give an exam. In this one week they learn things about each other they hid for two decades of friendship.

Fifty minutes down and the plot doesn’t pick up, all three of us were bored out of our brains and we eventually stopped streaming when 30 minutes were left. Two of us finished watching it by ourselves, since we have the incorrigible bug of finishing what we start. I saw the last part on 1.25x speed and it was still fucking tedious. For a romance film, you cannot even gauge the chemistry between the leads because there isn’t any. Reese and Ashton are almost never together at the same time and when they are talking to each other over the phone they are either anxious or pretentious. Steve Zahn as the random rich dude always working on Debbie’s lawn was the only minutely funny thing in this flick.

Apparently, Aline Brosh McKenna was born in 1967, which is strange, because when you watch ‘Your Place or Mine’ it feels like a 20-year-old wannabe author wrote a romance about 40-year-olds. Instead of trying to sound hip or whatever, the creator should’ve just written the script in human language instead of imaginary millennial garbage.

Reese’s Debbie is a typical caricatured helicopter mom whose personality is centred around her kid, Ashton’s Peter the stereotypical man-slut who cannot last in a relationship longer than 6 months and Wesley Kimmel (didn’t know he was a nepo kid, he is indeed Jimmy Kimmel’s son) as Debbie’s kid looked completely disinterested in his part. The kid is allergic to a thousand things, he is even ‘allergic to gym’, what does that even mean?

‘Hated the whole thing. Terrible acting, fuck all story, Bad script, fuck all direction,’ my friend Isha texted us on the group after she was done. That’s your quick one-line review guys. Don’t watch this. Our other friend took a guess that Reese Witherspoon looked like the only actor who cared about the script because she is probably the producer. She is.

It’s a 2/10 from me.