Vince and Jennifer’s The Break-Up is heading for a DVD review and the ad campaign is making the same mistakes that the movie release campaign made. Namely, this movie is being marketed as a hilarious comedy, and that’s just not the truth. Anyone seeing The Break-Up and expecting something like Wedding Crashers or Dodgeball is in for a serious shock.

The Break-Up is a tragedy with a few laughs. It’s a brutal exploration of a failed relationship--failed because of his selfish insensitivity, her foolish attempts at manipulation, and their combined immaturity. There are a few laugh-out-loud bits in it, but there are even more bits that leave viewers squirming in discomfort of the type you feel when couples fight in public. You feel that sense of too much intimacy with someone else’s problems.

And the chemistry between Vince and Jennifer isn’t so much romantic as it is familiar, confused, and angry.

This isn’t a romantic comedy; it’s a post-romantic tragedy with some funny bits. The end is almost anti-climactic. Without rising to a typical Hollywood ending, it only manages something happy-ish and unsatisfying.

Kind of like much of real life.

I recommend the movie, but only in an eyes open and minor way. It isn’t a major work of art, but it is a stab at dramatic legitimacy from a movie that I had fully expected to be a standard romantic comedy. It’s imperfect, uneven, and occasionally uncomfortable, but is also well-acted, sometimes insightful, and quirky.

Just don’t buy into the talk about it being a comedy.