The Five Year Engagement

About the film
The Five Year Engagement is a romantic comedy film that was released in 2012. The film is rated 15 due to sexual content and bad language throughout and it has a run time of 124 minutes. 

Plot
After only a year of being together, Tom proposes to girlfriend Violet, with her immediately saying yes. The couple live in San Francisco but when Violet gets offered her dream job at a Michigan college, Tom turns down a job as a head chef in order for Violet to fulfil her dreams. The move means having to postpone the wedding but only for a little while. However, in Michigan Tom has a hard time finding a job which suits his extensive skills as a chef. When Violet's job gets extended, Tom finds himself extremely frustrated and begins to lose himself and all hopes of actually getting to marry the women of his dreams. Violet's job extension begins to tear the couple, and their wedding date, apart, leaving them both to make some important decisions. Do these decisions include each other though?

What I thought
I have to be really in the mood for a romantic comedy and recently, I have been so there was a bit of a list I tried to get through. The Five Year Engagement was pretty high up on that list. 

This film wastes no time in getting straight to the point. We are quickly introduced to Tom and Violet who get engaged at the beginning of the film. While this doesn't give much time for getting to know the main characters, it does give a sense of what their relationship is like and what their life is like together. There is also a pretty cute flashback of how the couple met which is used a few more times throughout the film as well. Because of this start to the film, there is no chase between the guy and the girl like there is in a lot of romantic comedy films. 

Violet was quite the hard character to like. The Five Year Engagement gives us somewhat of a role reversal in the sense that Tom and Violet move to a different city because of her job offer, not his. Although both characters have good careers, his more established, the decisions are made because of Violet. I felt like Violet was quite a selfish character because she didn't give Tom's options much thought at all before saying she wanted to move somewhere with not many options for him. Also, neither character thought to actually research the place they were moving to in order to make sure they would both be ok. Maybe they did and it wasn't shown, I don't know. Anyway, it seemed to me that Violet only really cared about her career and not at all about his. However, as much as I disliked the character, I did think that Emily Blunt did a great job in the role. She was funny when she needed to be but could also be quite serious. 

Tom on the other hand, I loved. He came across as such a nice guy, being extremely thoughtful towards Violet and their relationship, especially as he gave up his dream job to move somewhere with her. He was obviously very considerate towards Violet but he did come over as a bit of a push over some of the time. He hardly ever spoke up for what he thought was right and just let Violet do whatever she wanted while he sat back and suffered. Jason Segel is fantastic as Tom and really shows what a good comedic actor he is. He timing was spot on with the jokes but he was also able to play serious really well at the same time. 

Unfortunately, this film wasn't nearly as entertaining or funny as I had expected it to be. The jokes were pretty predictable and nothing was really exciting about the development of Tom and Violet's relationship. The whole story was pretty bland and I think that there could have been a few more unexpected twists thrown in to the story to make it more exciting. As the film is just over two hours long, without anything big happening, it makes the plot seem like it drags for quite some time. The first half of the film was pretty boring and I only stuck with watching it really because I couldn't be bothered to move and turn it off. The second half of the film was better though but still not great. 

While this film was ok, it wasn't anywhere near great. The romance wasn't too good and neither were the jokes. This is definitely a film to buy only if you can get it really cheap.