REVIEWED - THE BREAK-UPThe Break-Up is a grimly unromantic tale of love on the rocks, writes Donald Clarke

The poster for The Break-Up depicts Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston lying on either side of a king-size bed. Vaugniston, neither of whose component entities looks happy, is divided by a strip of gaffer tape. The film, this image suggests, will be a raucous comedy of separation full of amusing squabbles over who gets to hang on to which consumer durable.

Not quite. Emerging from The Break-Up, which features no gaffer tape, a colleague and I agreed the picture reminded us less of The War of the Roses - itself not the jolliest of comedies - than of Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage.

Peyton Reed, previously the director of Down with Love and Bring it On, need not get carried away by this comparison. His film remains a hollow, aimless entertainment, but it revels in the cruelties of romantic love in a similar way to the Swedish film. It is, moreover, every bit as hilarious as the Bergman.

The film begins with the two principals meeting at a baseball game. There follows an effective credit sequence - snapshots of the couple displayed to the strains of Queen's You're My Best Friend - which stands in for the happy times. Then the grumbling begins.

After a grim dinner party, Vince and Jennifer slip into an argument about nothing and everything. In the writers' defence, they do a very good job of assembling some of the classic disputes that foul relationships. "I want you to want to do the dishes," Aniston moans. In short, the film trades in the gross generalisation that women think men are jerks and men think women are crazy.

Vaughn and Aniston, he typically laddish, she typically nice, effectively demonstrate how two such people might end up hating one another's guts. The problem is they are never allowed to show us what once made them love one another. No sane viewer could, after listening to the bile they parry back and forth, wish them to spend another second on the same continent.

The film-makers may, with some justification, argue that such pessimism helps lend their film a more realistic tone than most romantic comedies. Fair enough, but who really demands naturalism from a romcom?