Film Review - The Roses (2025)

The Roses is based on the War of the Roses (previously made into a movie in 1989 with Danny Devito, Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner) and stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Coleman as a British couple who move to California to start new careers as an Architect and Chef respectively but when a building design goes wrong Theo (Cumberbatch) takes on the role of House Dad and begins to resent his wife’s success with her seafood restaurant business.

I was kind of looking forward to this movie mainly because of Cumberbatch and Coleman in the lead roles, both can be very funny and are very talented actors but another redo of War of the Roses I wasn’t as keen on.

And sadly this movie is something of a disappointment for me mainly because while I was watching it I wanted it to be more than it ultimately was, Cumberbatch and Coleman have great chemistry together and deliver some great laughs but their stuck in a script (written by Tony Macnamara) that has so much fluff in it that I just wanted it all ripped out to allow these 2 great talents to try and kill each other for 90-100 minutes.

And the fluff comes primarily from the supporting cast which features the likes of Andy Samberg, Kate McKinnon, Ncuti Gatwa and Sunita Mani primarily and their lines are so fucking annoying and full of platitudes that it just annoyed me to no end, McKinnon and Gatwa’s characters in particular talk a lot in phrases that just made me want to go SILENCE!!! Like Paul Atredies in Dune Part Two because it became so fucking insufferable to hear over and over again.

And I’m sure they are meant to be this sort of California type but it just felt like the actors standing and/or sitting around on the set riffing or adlibbing and Jay Roach (the director of the film) should’ve taken an editorial machete to it but instead leaves a lot of it in and is it any wonder theatrical comedies died a terrible terrible death in the 2010’s, they turned into this insufferable Judd Apatow style comedy club where the actors just stand out adlibbing and improvising and what should have been a brisk 90-100 minute comedy became a 2 to 2 and a half hour borefest that dragged on and on and on because those in charge couldn’t bear to edit out that one ad lib that made them laugh on set.

And also the edge of this movie is really just the characters swearing a whole lot, the 1989 War of the Roses had all kinds of devious schemes in it as Douglas and Turner tried to do away with each other and there’s a little bit of it here but instead its just Cumberbatch and/or Coleman swearing a lot and after a while that grated with me too.

And it isn’t helped that this movie is coming out only a couple of weeks after the Naked Gun remake with Liam Neeson where that film packed gag after gag after gag throughout the film, gags in the forefront of the frame, in the back of the scene, at the sides of the scenery or the actors knowing the kind of comedy their in, there was always something to laugh at in that film whereas here the laughs started well but dried up big time after a while.

And so that was the Roses and this one was a letdown for me as it looked like a funny time at the cinema and well I didn’t laugh a whole lot and found large parts of it annoying to watch, 1.5 out of 5.