This was painful to watch.
Zach Braff plays a supposedly hot tempered, speaks-his-mind type that gets fired from his chef job. Having a pregnant wife (Amanda Peet), who is a lawyer and bread-winner but wants to be a stay-at-home mom, Braff moves his family to Columbus, Ohio in order to work for his father-in-law (Charles Grodin) at an advertising firm. There Braff is forced to work with Peet's ex from high school (Jason Bateman), an aggressive know-it-all...who happens to be in a wheel chair. Hijinks ensue.
The beginning was promising enough. A funny cameo by Paul Rudd and an all-around solid cast (including Amy Poehler, who disappears halfway through), along with a quirky office environment, had potential. Around the time Jason Bateman shows up, however, the movie falls apart. Bateman is playing against type, which is nice, as a complete asshole but his character has only one setting: evil. From the start he's never given any human shading. It's also awkward how often the movie goes for the easy wheelchair jokes. It's the 21st century, aren't we beyond that? Peet's character, as well, starts off with dimensions as a frustrated young mom (with human reactions to being at home all day with a baby), but eventually recedes into standard rom-com cliches. How often have we seen cinematic wives deny their husbands sex as a bargaining tool? The kid character, Wesley, nearly saves the whole fiasco but by the end I'd given up. I can't buy Braff as the take-charge type, and the movie never attempts to convince us after perfunctory exposition in the first act.
To top that all off, I watched an unrated cut that was bizarrely fifteen minutes shorter than the regular cut. After watching the movie I did a little searching online (because 77 minutes felt truncated) and found summarizes that talked about a completely different movie. Apparently in the theatrical cut Bateman's character turns out to have been faking the handicap the whole time, and gets up and walks out of the coffee shop at the end of the movie. Wha?
Really cheap, for all involved, and a mile marker on Braff's sad attempt to have a career outside of Scrubs.
