Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch prefer to kill the new War of the Roses

In the first sequence of The Roses (The Roses) we see the main character couple in therapy listing what they appreciate about their respective spouse. The aggravation of their respective lists ("it's better than living with a wolf", "he has arms" ...) scares the marriage counselor to the point that she diagnoses that as a couple they are hopeless. In the new adaptation of Warren Adler's novel, which Danny DeVito already brought to the screen in 1989 with Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas, the protagonists are English people living in the United States, and they find the wit of their respective insults hilarious, which, in turn, has scared the American therapist.

With this beginning, the screenwriter Tony McNamara (The favorite) underlines what should be one of the strong points of the new version of The War of the Roses, the British register of humor, which gives greater weight to the dialogue and the English character of the couple, played by Benedict Cumberbatch in one of his first comedy roles and a sublime Olivia Colman in the progressive transformation of her character. But not even the charisma of the actors manages to make a proposal fly, as it doesn't dare to push the limits of a story that is precisely about that. Of British origin, the script adopts more a rigid prestige than a truly sharp irony. Nor does it explore its most original idea. Here the crisis comes from the change in roles of the couple: she becomes famous and he stays home taking care of their children. Jay Roach, director of the saga Austin Powers, seems to have lost its talent for establishing comedic dynamics. When the film's finale descends into a self-destructive spiral, the climax should have moved forward with the relentless pace of a comedy sketch. slapstickAnd yet, here everything drags on with the heaviness of a bad couple's drama that's trying so hard to be funny.