Valentine’s Day is right around the corner, and if you can depend on nothing else, trust that there will be one or a handful of new romantic comedies to peruse –should that genre be your thing. Netflix is fulfilling that heartwarming promise this year with Your Place or Mine, starring Reese Witherspoon (who also produced) and Ashton Kutcher, making his return to rom-coms after 12 years. With the movie coming soon to Netflix, reviews are in for Your Place or Mine, so let’s see if the critics think this couple has more chemistry on-screen than those hilariously awkward red carpet pics!
The movie sees best friends Peter and Debbie swap houses, with her staying at his place in New York to pursue her dream, and him agreeing to keep an eye on her teenage son in Los Angeles. Will long-distance hilarity ensue? In addition to Ashton Kutcher and Reese Witherspoon, the Netflix movie boasts plenty of other big names, including Jesse Williams, Tig Notaro, Zoë Chao, Rachel Bloom, Steve Zahn and more. So let’s take a look at what the critics are saying, starting with CinemaBlend’s review of Your Place or Mine. Our own Sarah El-Mahmoud rates the movie 3.5 stars out of 5, saying the stars are in their element here:
Your Place Or Mine has that unexplainable warm and fuzzy goodness that may have you going in skeptical before full on crying at the hope of love by the time its credits roll. While it doesn’t tread new waters, it’s absolutely worth your time if you’ve been craving an old school romantic comedy that you don’t already know all the words to.
With the house-swapping plot between the two leading characters, Debbie and Peter apparently aren’t actually together for much of the movie. Instead Your Place or Mine uses phones and FaceTime to show their interactions via split screen, and Pete Hammond of Deadline says it’s done well enough that staying home for this movie would be a fine alternative to other Valentine’s Day offerings. He continues:
You can thank solid pros and veterans of the genre, Witherspoon and Kutcher, for really making this work as well as it does. This kind of movie can fall flatter than a pancake without the right chemistry, and even if they are not on screen together for the majority of the film it all works, especially as McKenna effectively employs the old fashioned device of split screens for their bi-coastal facetime and phone chats, even one sequence in dueling bathtubs that is a direct hommage (or steal?) to Rock and Doris in Pillow Talk.
Leah Greenblatt of Entertainment Weekly, however, does not agree. She grades the movie a C-, saying that even an audience with low expectations deserves more than what’s delivered by writer/director Aline Brosh McKenna and the “polished, empty leads,” who the critic also calls “two hollow-core planks.” From the review:
It is probably not great news for your project if you spend half the press tour defending your lack of red-carpet chemistry with your co-star. The carpet may be kinder, though, or at least mercifully briefer, than actually sitting through Your Place or Mine, an experience that often feels like watching two movie stars try to set fire to a pile of wet leaves for 100-plus minutes. What should be breezy, featherweight fun — Reese! Ashton! A screenplay by the lady who wrote The Devil Wears Prada and 27 Dresses! — instead turns out to be oddly hollow.
Lovia Gyarkye of The Hollywood Reporter thinks the writer constructs a tight narrative with Your Place or Mine, crafting less of a “will they or won’t they?” and more of a “why didn’t they?” The critic says:
The film returns to the genre’s blueprint and sticks with it. There are a couple of instances of subversion, moments when Your Place or Mine winks and pokes fun at itself. But for the most part it doesn’t want to surprise or be more clever than the viewer; it aims to please, and in doing so helps re-energize the romantic comedy.
Owen Gleiberman of Variety, however, says that a middle-aged comedy starring these two established actors should be perfectly pleasing. What it’s turned into, the critic says, is “two bad movies in one.” He continues:
Your Place or Mine is an outrageously benign movie, which may not sound like much of a criticism. But it’s so benign it’s innocuous. There’s no tension, no comedy with any bite (except for the dry one-liners of Tig Notaro as the best friend who’s there to give advice), no romantic friction. Jesse Williams, as the book-publishing maestro, is stranded without repartee, and Kutcher doesn’t quite make Peter a character. He’s polite, self-regarding, and slightly grandiose, as if he were running a seminar. As for Witherspoon, she’s forced to play Debbie in a way that’s so compulsively other-directed that the actor’s perkiness starts to seem like masochism.
If you want to give this one a try, Your Place or Mine will be available to stream with a Netflix subscription beginning Friday, February 10. In fact, Netflix has plenty of happy, romantic movies for your Valentine’s Day viewing, and if you want to see more from the leading lady, check out some of Reese Witherspoon’s best movies.
