When I first heard about The Ex, on the MySpace page of growing comedy star Zach Braff, it was called Fast Track and had a decent trailer that showcased the rivalry between Braff’s character and his wife’s paraplegic ex-boyfriend (Jason Bateman). It seemed that, in casting Braff and Bateman, director Jesse Peretz was aiming for a smart, subtle humor that could counterbalance the screwball, slapstick oneupmanship between the two characters. Instead, what Peretz got was a pair of actors hampered by a disjointed script and a movie that has fewer laughs in its 93 minutes than a 22-minute episode of either Scrubs or Arrested Development.

After being fired from his promising chef’s job on the same day that his wife Sophia (Amanda Peet) gave birth to their first child, and knowing that Sofia was trading in her law career to be a full-time mom, Tom Reilly (Braff) decides to move to her Ohio hometown and get a job with her father (Charles Grodin) at an ad agency. But his assigned mentor at the job is Chip (Bateman), who seems comfortable to have been playing the wheelchair card his entire life to excuse him from general social niceties. Chip sucks up to Tom’s father in law and steals his business ideas at work and flirts with his wife the rest of the time. Tom, for his part, concocts ways to expose Chip for the jerk that he is.

The film tries to be both a Meet The Parents kind of screwball comedy and a lesson-teaching romance along the lines of Braff’s last film, The Last Kiss, but succeeds at neither. The bast laughs come in the times where Braff and Bateman are pretending to be nice to each other, highlighted by a rough-and-tumble wheelchair basketball game, but even that restricts Braff’s ability to do anything but physical comedy. Almost every other moment in the movie is awkward and poorly constructed.

Where putting the casts of Scrubs and Arrested Development into a room and telling them to go at it would likely yield hilarious results, here Braff and Bateman, and Peet and Grodin, for that matter, are wasted in a terrible script that produces a few giggles but a multitude of groans.

Rating: * 1/2 of 5

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