Son ex et moi

So I just see this online the other day. What can you say. It's an older film and the titles obvious for what you'd expect.

But it's Bateman, he's great at this type of thing and only got better.

So if you want a laugh right now. Then have a look.

Jason Bateman shined in this average comedy featuring Zach Braff and Amanda Peet. Despite being in a wheelchair for the entire movie, Jason Bateman does a fantastic job making the audience despise his character Chip Sanders. Tom Reilly (Braff) moves back to his wife's home town to take a job working with his father-in-law. Despite his nice-guy efforts, co-worker Chip just won't let Tom feel like he's doing anything right. When we discover that Chip is actually Tom's wife's ex, Bateman's performance had me wishing that Zach Braff would strangle Chip in a fit of rage.

Zach Braff plays the likable main character who, just when you start to cheer for him, finds some idiotic way to disappoint you. I expected a little more from Amanda Peet after her hysterical performance in The Whole Nine Yards, but she performed solidly.

Jason Bateman proves in this flick just why he received so much critical acclaim for Arrested Development.

Zach Braff and Jason Bateman in one movie, hell yeah! How can it not be funny? Answer: by getting poor writers that have no idea of what makes these actors great. I guess "Fast Track" technically is a comedy, but it's just one without punchlines, funny one-liners or well, wit of any kind really. There's a lot of drama in there, there's a lot of romance, there's a lot of Amanda Peet talking about poo, but somewhere along the line they stopped bothering to put in actual laughs. There are indeed some attempts at humor in this movie, but it's the kind of situational drivel you already sigh at when it comes up in sitcoms, let alone in feature films. The actors save what there is to save, but they can't exactly make it laugh-out-loud funny with this material. A disappointment.

Just like most people who've written reviews for this film, I too was excited to hear about a film staring two great comedians like Braff and Bateman. How could you go wrong with these two? However, with two inexperienced writers and one inexperienced director; it's not hard to see where this film goes wrong.

The script is at times, very poor and extremely lacking in intelligent or deep humor, the characters are one dimensional and there are a lot of pointless and derivative scenes. There is no real chemistry between Braff and Peet and the soundtrack is somewhat lacking.

It's really awful to see such amazing talents go to waste in such a simple and shallow comedy such as this.

There are however, some great ideas in this film; the only shame is that they are not explored in their comedic entirety. Braff and Bateman are as usual, wonderful and do the best they can with the characters and the script they were given.

Writers David Guion and Michael Handelman and director Jesse Peretz must have called in a lot of favors when they made "The Ex," for how else to account for the presence of Zach Braff, Amanda Peet, Jason Bateman, Charles Grodin, Mia Farrow, Amy Poehler, Fred Armisen, Paul Rudd and Amy Adams in as slight an indie comedy as the one they have manufactured here? And "manufactured" is definitely the operative term in this case, for "The Ex" feels contrived and phony from the get-go.

After he gets fired from his job as a chef in an upscale Manhattan restaurant, Tom Reilly (Braff) moves with his wife and infant son back to her hometown in Ohio where he gets a job at the same ad agency where his father-in-law (Grodin) works. One of the employees, Chip (Bateman), an old flame of Tom's wife, Sofia (Peet), tries to sabotage Tom at every turn, undercutting him at work and trying to rekindle the romance between Sofia and himself.

"The Ex" fails on a variety of levels, but the primary one is that, while it is supposed to be a satire of small town, middle American values, most of the characters - with their New-Age quirkiness and bohemian eccentricities - seem as if they'd be more at home living in some converted loft in Soho than on a tree-lined street in suburban Ohio. The setting of "The Ex" doesn't feel like Anyplace, USA; in fact, it doesn't feel like anyplace, period, except maybe the fantasy world of two overpaid Hollywood screenwriters. Add to this an assortment of unappealing and unappetizing characters, a tendency towards sitcom-level humor and plotting, and an over-reliance on heavy-handed slapstick and sight gags, and you have one of the major comedy disappointments of 2007. Braff is definitely a talented actor, but "The Ex" is a career path misfire that should be mercifully forgotten