This new retread of ‘The War of the Roses’ never manages to capture the darkness of Danny DeVito’s 1989 classic. Here we have two British actors, Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch, transplanted to California. He plays a successful architect, she a successful chef. But when his career falters and he finds himself caring for their children full-time, the cracks begin to show. What follows, however, feels less like a serious drama and more like an excuse to watch two fine actors hurl insults at each other before quickly making up again. Their characters never feel fully real, and the arguments lack weight.

The director, Jay Roach – better known for broad comedies such as ‘Austin Powers’ and ‘Meet the Parents’ – seems unwilling to embrace the darkness of the material. The comedy never turns truly black, and every cutting remark is swiftly followed by reconciliation, robbing the film of tension. By contrast, DeVito’s 1989 version showed characters once in love but consumed by wealth, greed, and ego, each refusing to cede ground or show vulnerability, driving them towards mutual destruction. In this new version, we never believe the couple won’t recover; the ‘rails’, however shaky, are always restored for them.

The film gestures toward the idea that both characters are perhaps too successful for their own good, each wanting to be the primary breadwinner, and there are shades of ‘La La Land’ in the way professional imbalance breeds resentment. But unlike DeVito’s film, which carried a clear moral lesson, voiced directly by the director himself, that respect and compromise are smarter than destruction, this remake merely suggests that the line between love and hate is porous.

Released alongside Celine Song’s ‘Materialists’, a far more layered and textured study of relationships, ‘The Roses’ looks thin and overstated. Colman gives her usual energy to the role, swearing with relish as she did in ‘Wicked Little Letters’, but the words are not especially sharp, and the film tips into farce when she begins firing a gun inside the family home.

The result is a shallow and over-the-top version of a story that once had real bite. Where DeVito’s film was unafraid to show characters consumed by narcissism and beyond redemption, Roach’s version only flirts with darkness before retreating to safety. It fails to convince either as biting satire or as a serious portrait of a marriage collapsing, leaving us with little more than noise.