It needs to be said: Danny DeVito is underrated as a comedy director. The movie star turned It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia savior is certainly best known for a long list of film and television appearances (including Taxi) that are outrageously, unforgettably funny. But he’s also helmed such memorable movies as the whimsical Matilda, the twisted Strangers on a Train parody Throw Momma from the Train, the cruelly underrated Barney-inspired Death to Smoochy, and the hot comedy The War of the Roses. In fact, the shadow DeVito cast is so long that even as I discuss a remake of The War of the Roses that he has nothing to do with, I can’t help but herald his contribution to comedy — in part because DeVito would never have given us The Roses.
Look, on paper, The Roses sounds sensational.
Adapted from the same Warren Adler novel as DeVito’s 1989 The War of the Roses, this modern screenplay is written by Tony McNamara, whose scripts for The Favourite and Poor Things earned him Oscar nominations and critical acclaim. Promisingly, The Roses reunites him with Olivia Colman, the Academy Award–winning comedic dark star of The Favourite, and an actress who’s been cracking this critic up since the British series Peep Show. And she’s paired opposite Benedict Cumberbatch, who is less known for comedy but has been mixing it up with films like The Phoenician Scheme and The Grinch.
Adding a generous slathering of comedy chops, the supporting cast is stacked with the likes of Andy Samberg, Kate McKinnon, Allison Janney, Sunita Mani, Ncuti Gatwa, Jamie Demetriou, and Zoë Chao. The Roses should be wall-to-wall laughs, ranging from giggles to guffaws to shocked gasps.
And yet, this just isn’t all that funny. I blame director Jay Roach.
The Roses isn’t funny or ferocious enough.
Credit: Jaap Buitendijk / Searchlight Pictures
DeVito’s The War of the Roses is framed as a parable against divorce, told by the director himself, who plays the central couple’s friend and a divorce attorney who serves as a sage narrator across the decades-long rise and fall of the Roses. From the start, McNamara’s approach goes for something different by introducing a framing voiceover by the Roses themselves, Ivy (Colman) and Theo (Cumberbatch). In singsong voices, they reflect on how the film will end (true to the first movie), but with a surprisingly upbeat attitude. While there will be a twist on this voiceover’s context, this chipper change does reflect the overall tonal shift from the biting 1989 version and the bizarrely bouncy 2025 remake.
The general plot is the same: Theo was once the breadwinner of their household, while his wife, a baking genius who could make amazing culinary constructions modeled after landmarks, cared for their two kids — who have gotten too chubby for Theo’s liking. When his career takes an unexpected downturn, hers is on the rise! And resentments grow. He takes on raising their kids, turning them away from sweets and toward sprints. She is working long hours and experiencing an adult world that feels increasingly distant from Theo. When divorce comes, it’s acrimonious, and centered on who will get their dream house.
The new twist here is that the husband is an architect who built his dream house with the profits from his wife’s restaurants. So, Theo doesn’t want to give up his masterpiece, and she — bitter over the split — doesn’t want to give him it exactly because he wants it. (In DeVito’s, the husband was a lawyer whose wife bought and led the renovations on their home, which he paid for.) An increasingly immature series of pranks becomes increasingly dangerous, and even deadly. And while some dialogue and certain ploys at revenge hit hard, many of the jokes don’t land. What happened?
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Jay Roach lacks the bite for The Roses.
Credit: Lara Cornell / Searchlight Pictures
To Roach’s credit, he succeeds in establishing Ivy and Theo as a couple once ravenously in love. The scene of their first meeting feels exciting and hot, climaxing with the pair rushing into a restaurant’s freezer for a quickie before they’ve even shared their names. This irreverence for common decorum surfaces throughout the film, reflecting a shared impulsiveness as they exchange barbs brutal but funny even to each other, or ditch a dull dinner party by faking an utterly bizarre emergency.
Cumberbatch and Colman have solid chemistry in such scenes, and both have the devastating intensity to make McNamara’s most stinging lines land. But the tone that Roach offers is just achingly middle-of-the-road. Punches feel pulled at nearly every turn. A mean comment is almost immediately undercut by an emotional catharsis, be it a burst of screaming or a jaunty justification.
Roach’s Roses lacks the gothic flair of DeVito’s, which had its stars perform with an almost soap opera-like theatricality as they spat invectives against a rollicking musical score, which played like a storm brewing. By contrast, Roach’s tone is broader, in the vein of his hits like Meet the Parents or his similarly lackluster remake Dinner for Schmucks. The flare, daffiness, and daring he brought to Austin Powers is long behind him. And The Roses is the worse for its absence.
Not until the final act do the Roses amp up their war to the blisteringly comic levels teased in the trailer, and by then it feels too little too late in terms of verve or style. Worse still, the transition from bouncy American comedy with occasional mean jokes feels downright jarring when it comes to the point where they’re actually aiming to kill each other. Rather than the inevitable path DeVito’s lawyer once warned us of, this last act of The Roses just feels like we’ve walked into a different movie altogether.
Kate McKinnon is woefully miscast in The Roses.
Credit: Jaap Buitendijk / Searchlight Pictures
Throughout the film. Roach seems to regret taking on a dark comedy, peppering his cast with comedians far more known for goofiness than wilting wit. Samberg is in the DeVito role of the husband’s friend/lawyer, but is saddled with a barrage of cliched asides about the “inertia” of marriage. Even his signature warmth and silliness can’t shake off the cobwebs of such dusty jokes.
His partner onscreen is fellow SNL alum McKinnon, who, though she was a wondrous scene-stealer in Barbie, is actually exhausting here, beating a one-note joke into the ground. As a horny wifey, she wants to bang Cumberbatch’s Theo. It’s her only character trait besides being awkward. And whether it’s flirtations that are vaguely threatening or done in front of her husband as brazen emasculation, they just aren’t funny, even in a cringe sensibility. Yet Roach treats this thread like rich terrain, endlessly giving McKinnon screen time to flirt clumsily, but never hilariously.
Other comedic talents are likewise misused. Sunita Mani (Death of a Unicorn) and Ncuti Gatwa (Doctor Who) have bit parts as Ivy’s loyal sous chef and head waiter, mugging possibly more often than they actually get lines. Jamie Demetriou, a master of offbeat comedy, and Zoë Chao, who shined in The Afterparty, get only a couple of scenes as an annoying couple who can’t read social cues.
The only scene where supporting players bring the heat this comedy desperately needs is when Allison Janney and Samberg face off in a scene that’s very reminiscent of A Marriage Story. Samberg is the bumbling male attorney cowed by the ferocious female lawyer, who is equal amounts vicious and step-on-my-neck sexy as hell. Janney is perfectly cast and makes a meal out of every diva-like line. Joan Crawford would be proud.
The Roses lacks thorns and pricks.
While Cumberbatch is committed, Colman is a heavier hitter when it comes to nasty comedy. His cutting remarks score the occasional chuckle, but hers land like you’d expect from a royal bitch (like her queen in The Favourite) — devastating and regal. In these moments, we see a glimpse of what this could have been for The Roses. But Roach seems scared of giving his audience some truly detestable characters, so at every turn their bitterness is undercut by sidekicks yukking it up or an earnest attempt to even the scales with a new emotional twist or revealed vulnerability. All this softening blunts the cutting comedy that was the dark heart of DeVito’s The War of the Roses (no, I never read the book). And here, it feels less dark and more a tad saucy.
A comedy about a couple gone so toxic that they’re actively competing to murder each other over their dream house should be more dynamic, darker, and damned funny. The Roses by any other name would still be a middling comedy, but compared to the caustic and sexy ’89 gem? It can’t shine.
The Roses opens in theaters Aug. 28.
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