Tech romance: The distance between Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher dooms ‘Your Place or Mine’

This Netflix offering starring Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher takes two stars you might be interested in seeing together … and puts their characters on separate coasts.

There’s a gimmick at play here that results in the pair having very little screen time together. Hey, that makes it a lot easier for the actors to plan shoot schedules! This allows Reese to have more time for other projects like The Morning Show, and Kutcher gets … more weed and gaming hours, I guess?

The title of this movie, Your Place or Mine, screams banal rom-com routine garbage—and that’s exactly what this is.

When Peter, a corporate adviser in Manhattan, gets a little break in the action, he offers to fly to Los Angeles and watch best-friend Debbie’s high-maintenance kid. Debbie (Witherspoon) needs to take some sort of accounting course in Manhattan (something that could surely be handled remotely these days). Peter lets her stay in his New York pad while he crashes at her Los Angeles home. Your place or mine … get it?

Peter had sex with Debbie once a long time ago, but no way, I mean never, would that sort of thing happen again, with them consequently winding up a happily-ever-after couple. They are just friends, dammit. In your dreams, rom-com aficionados!

As for their onscreen chemistry … who knows? They barely spend time onscreen together. Most of their scenes are conducted on the phone or via video chat. You see, this is a rom-com for today! All of this wonderful technology! Of course, this film will be dated five years from now, when we converse and date through holograms and brain injections. Never base your film on current technology. Didn’t directors learn from the old-timey computer screens Ridley Scott utilized in Alien?

This is basically Witherspoon—an Oscar winner—slumming, and Kutcher, a likable goofball, doing the stuff he usually does, just with a worse-than-normal script. I don’t think they are going to be the new Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. This lame entertainment train stops here.

Your Place or Mine is now streaming on Netflix.