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  EW review: Don't bother with 'Break-Up'Hard to care about Vaughn-Aniston relationshipBy Owen Gleiberman  Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn make a scene in "The Break-Up." YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS(Entertainment Weekly) -- When he first showed up in "Swingers," that 1996 indie classic of masculine style and anxiety, Vince Vaughn had a startling shoot-to-kill glee. Taller, by a head, than anyone around him, with black-diamond eyes that gave off a glint of repressed panic, he came on like a born player but also a bit of a nutcase, with an assaultively funny motormouth rhythm all his own. (He was like Christopher Walken's hypomanic son.) This mock hipster, who liked to call his friends ''Baby,'' was himself a giant baby-man -- an overgrown case of arrested cool. "The Break-Up," a synthetically hostile he said/ she said cartoon of a romantic comedy (it's "Friends" meets "The War of the Roses"), tries to present Vaughn, for the first time, as a domesticated Hollywood leading man, but from what we can tell he's even more of a baby than before, pitching his testy patter to no one in the room but himself. Taking a cue from Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler, Vaughn flaunts a jelly belly and a slob wardrobe; he doesn't act in this film so much as he hangs out in it. He and Jennifer Aniston play a Chicago couple who terminate their two-year relationship but keep trying to live together in the condo they co-own. As he sets up sleeping quarters opposite his beloved big-screen TV, their backbiting fits degenerate into a hatred that gets jacked up, scene by scene. She blasts Alanis Morissette's ''You Oughta Know'' and tosses his clothes out; he brings in the pool table they never had room for (though, frankly, the place looks big enough for a pool table and a bowling alley). By the time he hosts a night of strip poker, with busty bimbos smoking cigars under disco lights, you may wonder why he doesn't just go off with one of them and leave this dead shark of a relationship behind. A lot of people will probably want to see "The Break-Up," not just for the gossipy potential of its Vaughniston/Brangelina tie-ins but because the concept, which is all there is to the film, hinges on the universality of romantic implosion. We've all dumped and been dumped, and you go to see this movie for the comic jolts of recognition -- the eternal war between what men and women want. That's the idea, at any rate. What "The Break-Up" comes down to, though, is this: Brooke (Aniston), nice and WASPy and generous and tasteful, is a girl-next-door beauty with a classy job at an art gallery; Gary (Vaughn), a Polish prole who gives rambunctious bus tours of Chicago, doesn't do much at home besides sulk and play videogames. The movie is structured, in the screwball tradition, as a comedy of remarriage, though we can barely see what these two ever had together. A credit montage depicts their supposedly happy two-year union in a series of photographs, and then we cut to Gary arriving home before a dinner party, toting three lemons; Brooke had asked him to get 12. He objects -- to going out and getting more lemons; to the lemon centerpiece she wants to create; to setting the table; to doing much of anything. (Then he disses her cooking.) This doesn't exactly look like a balanced relationship -- but, more to the point, it's not a balanced comic situation. So what's Gary's side of the story? We're meant to feel his pain when Brooke's brother, a men's-chorus leader played by John Michael Higgins from "A Mighty Wind," leads the dinner table in a campy impromptu version of ''Owner of a Lonely Heart'' -- one of those cringe-worthy prefab audience conversation pieces designed to warm the hearts of test marketers. But why should Gary care that his girlfriend's brother is a showboating music queen? "The Break-Up" makes a lame attempt to balance our sympathies, but really, it's the story of a nice girl making the eminently sensible decision to dump a psychotically selfish lout. There are some energized arguments, even if most of them aren't very funny. Aniston, so wan in the sparkling "Friends With Money," has a feistier rhythm here, but she's got to alter something -- her hair, her gamine sweetness -- if she wants to leave that manicured TV vibe behind her and become a movie star. The best bits are incidental: Vaughn's chats with Jon Favreau as his bartender buddy, which are delightful interludes of jostling ego, and Judy Davis, looking like Anna Wintour redesigned by Tim Burton as an undead marionette, laying down the law as Aniston's boss. I won't tell you how it all ends (other than to note that it's icky in its lack of conviction), but I will say this: Watching "The Break-Up," it barely even occurred to me to think of Aniston's breakup with Brad Pitt or her current union with Vaughn. Those relationships are real. This one, in every sense, is fake. EW Grade: C 'District B13'Reviewed by Marc Bernardin Leave it to the French to resurrect the Great White Martial Artist. And in "District B13," this Luc Besson-hatched action flick, we get two: Leito (David Belle) and Damien (Cyril Raffaelli), mismatched badasses who have to extract a WMD from a nasty futuristic Parisian ghetto. The big innovation here is that the two nimble leads, stuntmen-turned-stars, are devotees of parkour, a fancy French word for the fluid use of urban environments as jungle gyms. And while the fight scenes do carry a nifty charge, parkour itself isn't quite revolutionary: Jackie Chan's been doing the same thing for 20 years. EW Grade: B 'Cavite'Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman One of those blistering no-budget thrillers, like "Open Water" or "Detour," in which the film's economy of means is the trigger for its ingenuity. In "Cavite," Adam, a surly young Filipino American (he's played by codirector Ian Gamazon), arrives in Manila to attend his father's funeral. A cell phone rings, and suddenly he is being ordered around town by a derisive Muslim terrorist who has kidnapped his mother and sister. What follows is a breakneck inner-city odyssey of jump-cut shaky-cam suspense, as Adam, guided through the squalor of his homeland, receives a brutal lesson in the culture wars. EW Grade: B+ Click Here 
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