Zach Braff fans will be happy to know “The Ex” plays like an extended, very special episode of “Scrubs.”
And since “Scrubs” is a pretty good way to spend your TV time, “The Ex” isn’t a bad way to spend date night at the movies. Mind you, it’s no “Garden State,” but it does live up to a few of the best moments in “She’s Having a Baby,” whose plot and attitude it consciously echoes.
The plot is familiar, the sensibility is middle-of-the-road, the execution is occasionally uninspired. But “The Ex” succeeds well enough because Braff is comfortable in his every-slacker comic mode, Amanda Peet is nice to look at, and Jason Bateman is hilariously hateable as a passive-aggressive villain.
“The Ex” opens in the hot, resentment-filled kitchen of a swanky Manhattan restaurant. Braff is Tom Reilly, a cook about to be promoted to chef when his evil manager (another welcome cameo from Paul Rudd) sets him off. He’s fired, after an intense food fight, and returns home to tell his wife Sofia (Peet) and newborn baby that he needs a job.
The trio moves back to Ohio, and Tom takes a job with father-in-law Charles Grodin’s advertising agency. This is where the humor of “The Ex” has its most tantalizing bite, as director Jesse Peretz sends up the faux-Zen corporate culture of modern ad gurus. The hip-for- Cleveland agency is overseen by a namaste-spouting snowboarder (Donal Logue) who encourages his staff to toss around the invisible “Yes” ball to stimulate creative thinking.
We don’t use “business-casual” dress codes here, Tom is told. We use “business-appropriate.”
The sneaky scene-stealer here is Bateman as Chip, a wheelchair-bound ad whiz who is both Tom’s mentor at the agency and a former boyfriend of Sofia’s. “The Ex” is one of the few movies allowing a disabled character to be as much of a jerk as the next jerk, if not more so. Chip undermines Tom every chance he gets – inviting him to play wheelchair basketball, for example, and then neglecting to tell the other disabled players that Tom can actually walk.
Back at home, Sofia deals with a little realistic unhappiness as a restless mom. Her circle of childhood friends has turned into the Stepford moms, worshipping every baby bowel movement as if it were a celestial revelation.
So much of comedy is in the timing, though, and “The Ex” doesn’t quite know when to quit. Or at least move on.
Tom loses one skirmish after another, with Chip, with Sofia, with his father-in-law, with the cute kid next door, and it adds up to 70 minutes of humiliation. We know he’s going to come out on top, because this is a romantic comedy, after all – so get to the point, already.
Ten more minutes of editing – “The Ex” was repackaged from a 2006 near-release called “Fast Track” – would have done this film a huge favor. “Scrubs,” after all, wraps things up in about 22 minutes.
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at 303-954-1686 or at mbooth@denverpost.com.
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“The Ex”
PG-13 for profanity, drug use, sexual situations|1 hour, 25 minutes|COMEDY|Directed by Jesse Peretz; written by David Guion and Michael Handelman; starring Zach Braff, Amanda Peet, Jason Bateman, Charles Grodin and Mia Farrow|Opens today at area theaters.
