Posted by: Mike on Aug 30th, 2012

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The Five-Year Engagement

Jason Segel is funny. There’s no doubt about that.  And, based on the movies he’s written, he’s had his heart smashed to a million pieces more times than one person should have to endure.  I’m a huge “How I Met Your Mother” fan, and especially of Segel’s.

The Five-Year Engagement is another movie that Segel has his hand in writing. And after the hilarious Forgetting Sarah Marshall, I wanted to check this out.

The first thing you’ll notice is that it’s long. It’s a two hour plus comedy. And there are a lot of points of downtime. Many times throughout I felt that it was dragging along, and would have definitely edited out some parts of it, were I an editor.  That’s not to say that each scene couldn’t be seen as important to the plot of the story, but they could have trimmed some bits to save on time.

I laughed quite a bit throughout. Not as hard as Sarah Marshall, but still enough to say I enjoyed it.

What I most definitely enjoyed was the last 15-20 minutes. There is an amazing payoff at the end of the movie.  My gut reaction when it happened was (and I said outloud), “it took way too long to get there, but I’m glad that’s where it went”.

Overall I enjoyed the movie. It may me laugh, (almost) cry, and root for the characters.  The title may be a bit misleading, but it’s still worth seeing.  A good ol’ fashioned romantic comedy that you can snuggle up and watch with someone you love. (Be warned though, there are some sad parts throughout!)