Your Place or Mine

Grade: C-

Less than 30 seconds into Your Place or Mine (a recently dropped Netflix Original), I already had a bone to pick. The movie opens in 2003, with Ashton Kutcher and Reese Witherspoon getting it on in a PG-13 romcom one night stand. Playing in the background is Gwen Stefani’s “The Sweet Escape,” not released until 2006. Whoopsie. If someone hadn’t already submitted that goof to IMDb, I would have. I know what year one of my guiltiest pleasure songs came out; you can’t slip something like that past me. It’s a minor quibble by the end.

I’ll apply as much reason, plausibility, and coherence here as the movie does, and I’ll talk about the supporting characters first. They seem to know that they are peripheral players in someone else’s film. They apparently don’t have jobs or lives of their own, and are free to show up everywhere to mainly act as sounding boards for Kutcher and Witherspoon to bounce ideas and thoughts off of. There’s a [not very funny] running gag with one of them, who always has a Starbucks-like coffee cup in hand. Steve Zahn plays Zen – an independently wealthy surfer dude who literally has nothing else to do but creep around the outside of Witherspoon’s house all the time, tending to her garden. Zoe Chao plays Minka, a former friend-with-benefits of Kutcher. She drops everything in whatever was happening in her life to devote her existence to being Witherspoon’s new bestie, and second-banana comic relief.

So, how did they meet, and why is she so chummy with Witherspoon? Let’s go back to the beginning. Kutcher and Witherspoon star as Debbie and Peter. They hook up one night in 2003, where they hear that great song 3 years before everybody else. They never make it relationship-official, they move to opposite sides of the country, and she gets married. But they remain good friends who call/FaceTime almost daily. Cut to the present day – 20 years later. Debbie is a divorced mother of a 13 year old boy. By hearing the banter between the two main characters, it’s glaringly obvious to us that they should have been together all along – and it made me wonder why that never happened, as meanwhile, potential suitors (who are meant to rub us the wrong way) are paraded on and off. And our two leads spend most of a movie frustratingly oblivious to the obvious.

Through a contrived series of events, they swap residences for a week. She stays at his apartment, while he acts as Mr. Mom to her teenager at her humble home. Kutcher’s place is ridiculous. He books cross-country flights at the last minute, rents a convertible, and can score luxury box tickets to a hockey game. Whatever he did for a living as the movie begins, we see him up and quit that in an early scene.

I like Ashton Kutcher and Reese Witherspoon. They look great here. Even if you’re nursing a crush on one of them, you won’t be too distracted to be offended by the repeated insults to your intelligence this film provides. I haven’t been thrilled with most of the past year’s Netflix Originals (Day Shift, Me Time, You People, and I thought The Power of the Dog was overrated), and I will approach any incoming ones with a weary, skeptical eye. Your Place or Mine is forced, awkward, unfunny, and logically bankrupt.

Grade: C-