Before the opening credits are up, The Break-Up has given us what most romantic comedies take 90 minutes to do. Gary (Vince Vaughn) and Brooke (Jennifer Aniston) meet, make cute in a way that guarantees a good story will come out of it, and click. He’s tall and assertive and acerbic, she’s pretty and intelligent and charming. And it’s love.

Time passes, and Gary and Brooke move in together. He operates a tour bus company with his brothers, and she works at an art gallery with appropriately eccentric coworkers. They have their friends, they have their families, they have couples bowling and they have “game night.” And, of course, they have each other… right up until the point that they don’t.

The driving thought behind The Break-Up is that we live under a glut of romantic comedies fixated on the isn’t-it-sweet trials of burgeoning love. Certainly there’s a case to be made for that argument; studios turn out romantic comedies at a steady and time-honored pace. This trend is almost solely responsible for the careers of Sarah Jessica Parker, Mark Ruffalo, and, er, Jennifer Aniston.

So: Romantic comedies are predictable. The basic formula is as familiar to us as the Oscar Meyer theme song. Set up the separate lives of our man and our woman and see how they get along while single. Introduce their respective “wacky” friends. The man and woman meet and begin seeing each other, usually under some false but not mean-spirited pretense. Attitudes are changed. The man and woman grow to genuinely care for each other. Then some misunderstanding occurs, or the false pretense is revealed, and we’re given a montage to represent to agony of being apart. Cue reconciliation, and everyone goes home happy. Reliable. Predictable. Boring.

So, to paraphrase Tolstoy, if all happy relationships resemble one another, do dying relationships die in their own way? Does the death of a relationship make for a better story than its beginning?

Yes and no. The Break-Up takes us away from the standard rom-com formula by choosing to engage in a curiously formulaic approach of its own. Most of the movie is focused on the escalating arms race between Gary and Brooke as each tries to force the other to move out of the beloved condo. Gary watches ESPN at high-volume till all hours of the morning; Brooke retaliates by letting her brother’s chorus group practice in her bedroom early in the morning. She goes on dates with attractive men, he has strip poker parties in the dining room. And so on.

The gamble is that this kind of escalation, punctuated regularly by reconciliation with wacky friends on both sides, is enough to carry a film. The risk doesn’t pay off. Even at just over an hour and a half the film drags, and, as with standard romantic comedies, we start to wonder when the characters on the screen will wise up to what is plainly obvious to us.

There is no great crime committed by the cast, but both Vaughn and Aniston do little to break out of what is rapidly becoming their niche roles. Vaughn talks and talks and talks, and Aniston stutters and hesitates and acts uncertain. Jon Favreau and Joey Lauren Adams, as the wacky friends of both, do their bit to be stabilizers, enablers, and gender clichés. No one sags, but no one elevates, either.

The Break-Up has obvious ambitions to be an adult study of a relationship, which is true only insofar as you compare it to stock rom-com’s. That those relationships that don’t end in lifelong commitment are still valuable to a person’s growth is supposed to be The Break-Up’s Lesson Learned, but it’s not a message that’s revolutionary to anyone over the age of, oh, 21.

Not that it’s impossible to juggle comedy and truth. One need look only as far as last year’s consistently The Forty-Year-Old Virgin to find a romantic comedy that balances genuine laughs with careful observation and nuanced characterization. But if The Break-Up is meant to signal further growth in a stagnant genre, then we’ve still got a long way to go.