Your Place or Mine Review

Either through exhaustion or not paying attention to the world around us, some audience members may have flashed back to 2011 when laying eyes on Your Place or Mine. Ashton Kutcher took nearly a decade away from the big screen before returning to this Netflix original. Reese Witherspoon shifted to Golden Globe-nominated television work. Their relevance has not faded, just changed. While they have adapted to new work, it would appear Your Place or Mine is still rooted in a nostalgic vortex, hoping 50 First Dates or The Break-Up is set for reappraisal somewhere down the line. Aline Brosh McKenna, a firm hand in the writing department for The Devil Wears Prada, hopes the reminiscence of the mid-2000s is enough for its audience. Why else do Akon and Gwen Stefani’s The Sweet Escape open this rom-com?  

Horribly dated to the core and rotted right through, that appears to be the point for Your Place or Mine. Constant fourth-wall-breaking moments point out fashion choices and character flaws and do so with pings and wallops of cheap sound effects. Of course, those decisions are made to showcase the past. Flashing to two decades later does little to change the course of their mid-2000s piece. Your Place or Mine is trapped in a solo rendition of Wife Swap with stars hoping to shine up their charm after their previous big rom-coms from the last decade hit that sweet nostalgia spot. Everything is formulaic and the chemistry between Kutcher and Witherspoon struggles on through.  

Friendliness is at the core of Your Place or Mine, a foundation that Witherspoon and Kitcher bring to life as best they can. Jealousy runs rampant and Your Place or Mine struggles with the initial criticism that comes from relationships between differing sexes. McKenna’s direction and writing fail to provide much clarity to that envy and bitterness but do even less to express a competent argument against it. With both sides feeling tepid at best, it makes for a nonsensical inevitability, a series of supporting characters whose arguments are proven not through action but barebones writing. Much of the focus is on the will they, won’t they back-and-forth and considering how flawed its core is, the house swap angle makes very little difference.  

Two friends outgrow themselves but not one another. A flash cut of differing lives, single parenthood and bachelor living makes Christian Grey’s home look like a single apartment that houses a law graduate struggling to find a job. Kutcher reverts to the characteristics of the frat guy lead while Witherspoon gets to pursue the dream that feels just out of reach but is fumbled toward with ditzy joy. Your Place or Mine has two stars right at the core of it, two returning benchmarks of the genre in its height. They are well-placed and neither has lost their charm, but the fundamentals of this story, the core of its writing and the sappy, uncoordinated nostalgia for films that explained their ending with cue cards and a pan back from a happy family. Brackets should never be featured in the ending summary of a movie that failed to tell its story, that is bad writing.