Breakin’ All the Rules

A magazine editor (Jamie Foxx) gets dumped in nasty fashion, so he retaliates by writing a manual on how to break up the right way. That winds up being just a little subplot in what turns out to be a movie about mistaken identity, deception and Gabrielle Union’s hair. While some of the stars do OK work, including Foxx and Morris Chestnut as his womanizing cousin, the movie feels like a thousand others, has nowhere to really go, and clocks in at a short 85 minutes. A silly subplot with Jennifer Esposito as a conniving woman trying to get a rich man to marry her makes the film feel like three hours, although Peter MacNicol as that rich man gets a couple of laughs. Director Daniel Taplitz seems to know that his film is running out of gas by the halfway mark, so there are many jokes involving a drunken pug dog thrown in for good measure. Foxx and Union make for an appealing screen couple, but the film around them is derelict. (CPL, CS)