What do you do with a romantic comedy that isn’t funny but does a pretty good job of talking about romance? Is it a failure if 50% of the movie fails to do what the genre dictates but the other 50% (or maybe 25%) is pretty good? Yeah, kind of is but I still liked a core nugget of this flick.

We Broke Up is about man who proposes to his long-time girlfriend who immediately vomits. Not a great sign for the relationship so they break up… but they have her sister’s wedding and he’s part of the ceremony so they go together anyway.

I found the two lead characters very well written, especially the woman. Their relationship works and I felt for them as they tried to manage their collapsing, rebuilding, and collapsing again romance. You rarely ever see a Hollywood character – much less a female character – who loves someone but doesn’t want to be forced into society’s standards for love and marriage. And the movie doesn’t pull a last minute save either. I kind of loved that about this movie.

And yet… wow… it’s just not funny. It’s not that it’s a type of humor I find offensive or stupid… it’s just a lot of unfunny jokes. Unfunny romantic comedies are a dime in a dozen in my book… but this flick just seemed different somehow. Just weirdly flat in a style that is different from the standard rom-com. Obviously humor is subjective so who knows, maybe this is genius. But I don’t think so.

I think, for the right type of people, the romance angle in this movie might be enough to make it worth watching. Kind of was for me. But it wasn’t enough to make it a particularly engaging sit all the way through. They should have ejected the comedy and just made it a romance or drama.

Score: 74