Even while sticking to the rigid romantic comedy formula, "The Five-Year Engagement" finds enough small laughs to make it work, though you probably shouldn't expect to see anyone rolling in the aisles. The plot may be half-baked and there are some long stretches without a gag that hits, but fun performances from Emily Blunt and Chris Pratt bail "The Five-Year Engagement" out, giving us just enough to see it all the way to the finish line.
Tom (Jason Segel) and Violet (Emily Blunt) seem to be the perfect match when they take the plunge into engagement, which everyone assumes will be just a formality before the big day. Though they've only known each other for a year, they seem at ease with each other's quirks and imperfections, and their families look on from the background with limited patience. It may seem like a joke to Tom and Violet at first, but grandparents mean it when they tell their grandchildren not to wait too long. Best to not find that out the hard way.
Complications arise. When Violet's sister Suzie (Alison Brie) gets pregnant following the engagement party, Violet suddenly has to sit and watch her sister have the beautiful wedding meant for her. Not helping is that Suzie marries Tom's best friend Alex (Chris Pratt), a hopeless dimwit seemingly blessed with much more luck than he deserves. Violet and Tom may feign apathy, but they eventually admit to each other that they won't be able to top it, and the enthusiasm for their own wedding begins to fade.
Added into the mix is Violet's budding career as a psychologist, which requires our happy couple to give up San Francisco for the frozen tundra of the University of Michigan. Tom does his best to downplay the weather and career shift, but it's a big change from running a kitchen in a popular restaurant to making sandwiches at a café. When he approaches other restaurants in town, even the local chefs laugh in his face for giving up San Francisco for ice scrappers and slush.
Meanwhile, Suzie fits right in with her new friends in academia, particularly an overly smooth professor (Rhys Ifans) who instantly feels like a guy you might not want your girlfriend hanging around. As Suzie and Tom delve into their own new circles in a new town, the engagement gets pushed off and delayed, and suddenly they are the malcontent couple they never thought they could be.
Though this sets up a funny and very real dilemma, something that many couples doubtless go through, "The Five-Year Engagement" also tries to head in way too many directions all at once. When Segel's character goes from a laid back California boy to dressing like Paul Bunyan and skinning deer three at a time, it's easy to see that the screenwriters were reaching. What starts as an interesting premise padded by funny observations eventually devolves into standard low-brow comedy, and we're left with a movie that isn't really as funny as it should be.
But even if Segel's character is fairly dull, there are other characters that help pick up the slack and fill in the gaps. Known mostly for hit TV series "Parks and Recreation," Chris Pratt plunges head-first into his role as Tom's over-the-top best friend and ends up with some of the funniest moments in the movie. Though the character could have played like obvious slapstick-level humor, Pratt shows an uncanny ability to seem earnest when the things coming out of his mouth are too absurd to take seriously.
Emily Blunt is also both fun and likable as Violet, a beautiful women with a matching IQ who somehow manages to come off as down to Earth. Though her role is mostly straight forward, Blunt comes off as the girl next door instead of being a caricature, which helps make the movie feel much less formulaic than it actually is. Blunt may be a pretty face but she shows that she has more depth than a romantic comedy like "The Five-Year Engagement" actually needs.
Moviegoers will mostly head out to see a movie like "The Five-Year Engagement" because it's based on such a familiar situation, and just about everyone meets a couple like Violet and Tom. While it starts with some funny scenarios and shows some promise, it turns out to be about what you would expect from a mainstream romantic comedy, which brings both the good and the bad. Like his "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," director Nicholas Stoller has delivered another pleasant comedy that gives us some laughs but never really clicks, leaving us a loving but pedestrian rom-com that could have been more.
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June 12, 2026 17:14 ET Major central bank action was the focus this week in economic news. The European Central Bank became the first major central bank to move in response to the rising inflationary pressures in the backdrop of the conflict in the Middle East. In North America, the U.S. inflation and trade data as well as Canada’s central bank decision gained attention. The Chinese trade data was the main news in Asia.