If I wanted someone to hate musicals, I would show them this movie. To paint a picture: imagine that you took La La Land and Marriage Story, squeezed out the juice, dripped it on the floor, soaked it up with a rag and squeezed that into a glass. Then you would have The Last Five Years.

The film (based on a musical of the same name) follows Cathy (Anna Kendrick) and Jamie (Jeremy Jordan) as they navigate their failing marriage. He’s a successful writer and she’s a struggling/failed actress. They live in New York, and that’s basically the entirety of their character development. They have a nice-ish house, go to parties and live some sort of Hollywood idea of what people do.

Honestly, this film is a duet album disguised as a musical. What bothers me most about it though is how insulting it is towards the audience. No one in the modern day thinks that this sanitised New York creative lifestyle is aspirational or even remotely interesting. Maybe it’s because I’m a jaded millennial, but I just can’t buy that Cathy and Jamie are failing artists living in a gorgeous New York apartment.

Having nuanced and complicated characters is important, and I understand that flawed characters are essential. But I just found both of them painfully entitled and unlikeable. One of Anna Kendrick’s songs even laughs at her peers settling down and having families, saying that “I can do better than that”, pushing her into dangerous not-like-other-girls territory. Cathy and Jamie’s neurotic arguments felt so far from what couples actually disagree about and I wasn’t rooting for them as a couple at all.

The music wasn’t bad, but it certainly wasn’t memorable. Maybe it’s because I’ve never seen the stage show. Maybe it’s because it there were only two characters singing, which doesn’t really feel like a musical to me. But I was thoroughly underwhelmed.

Jeremy Jordon has one song, “The Schmuel Song”, where he gets to explore his inner musical theatre kid for a vaguely comedic effect, but this is really the only good scene in the movie.