Flasz On Film

Synopsis: Architect Theo and chef Ivy’s decade-long marriage unravels as career reversals and simmering resentments turn love into open warfare. Their escalating battle—marked by sabotage, jealousy, and darkly comic confrontations—culminates in a final, explosive night in the dream house that once symbolized their unity. It’s a sharp, suspenseful portrait of ambition, ego, and the fragile line between devotion and destruction. 

The 1989 The War of the Roses was described by Roger Ebert in his three-star review as a “black, angry, bitter, unrelenting comedy,” which summarized this surprise box office hit quite neatly. It was a movie that took the war between sexes, waged in the culture for decades already, to a fever pitch and offered a piece of entertainment that—bolstered by the combined star power of Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas—resonated so well exactly because it didn’t look like a comedy. Its entire shtick was that it rode really close to the edge and had the audiences wonder if they were supposed to laugh, take sides or watch the snowballing horror with their heads in their hands.  

But that was well over thirty years ago. We don’t need Danny DeVito to adapt Warren Adler’s book to have a front row seat to a brutal war of attrition between entrenched sexes. But just like in Marvel movies where nobody stays dead apart from Uncle Ben, everything is remakeable except Citizen Kane. Therefore, we have been given an opportunity to see how The War of the Roses functions in a culture where the conflict between genders has only increased in brutality in the intervening years. 

However, even the title alone—The Roses sans the war—might give you an idea that the filmmakers themselves knew that the times had changed and giving the old movie a new polish and a fresh pair of stars (here Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman) would not be the best idea. The whole thing has been conceptually redesigned from ground up and the acrid satire that characterized the original movie has been replaced with caustic wit and snappy banter, thus leaning more towards comedy and ditching the ambiguous darkness of the original.   

What The Roses ditches in terms of edge and moral ambiguity, it surely makes up for in sheer laughs. It’s a breezy cocktail of role-reversal screwball and awkward cringe comedy that canonically remains tethered to its big conceit of two people not only falling out of love but snowballing into open conflict with each other, but it’s way more uplifting in its disposition than DeVito’s 1989 effort. In a way, it’s a whole different beast, which is what might draw some criticism towards it. Why sanitize a piece of pitch-black satire after all? And the answer is simple: in 2025, The War of the Roses would have only ossified our cultural positions and hardened the divide between sexes that is already in terrible shape. 

Meanwhile, the Jay Roach-directed remake is a piece of funny escapism, a relationship comedy that succeeds on the back of its witty jokes and bouts of awkwardness courtesy and sass of the supporting cast of SNL alumni Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon, as well as Ncuti Gatwa, Allison Janey and others. It clearly isn’t an attempt to add to the conversation about women’s opportunities and how their success might emasculate their insecure male partners. It uses those frictions as springboards for jokes instead.  

Thus, The Roses remains a thoroughly commendable, yet totally disposable, comedy that succeeds on its own terms as a purveyor of good times at the movies. Even though it is inescapable that viewers who choose it as their date night entertainment will end up taking sides on some level, there is absolutely no risk of silent car rides home here, let alone the conflict spilling over into real life. While it was impossible to label the original as such, The Roses is definitely a rom-com at heart. But with F-bombs, C-Bombs, and other bombs, all of which are delivered so that the movie is crass, sassy, witty and caustic, but never fundamentally unpleasant. Its humour looks threatening from afar, but it is, quite fortunately, not venomous. Examples are plenty: from McKinnon’s weirdly sexual body language to couple’s therapy sessions full of snappy comebacks and a truly cringey dinner party sequence. It’s just good fun delivered by people who know how to make fun of themselves; no more, no less. 

So if you’re after a cutting piece of gloomy satire in which even the ending leaves a sour aftertaste—you will remember that as they laid dying after a hurricane of vitriol-laden violence, in his final gesture Michael Douglas reached out to his wife only to be pushed away—you won’t find it here. For this kind of stuff, just head to TikTok and other social media. The Roses offers an escape. Between fun and jokes, some of which are a bit gross, if I’m honest, its conflict trends towards convenience, not edge. And that’s OK because real life has become spicy enough that it almost feels refreshing to look at two affable and skilled performers hurl insults at each other in a way that looks inoffensive and gleeful.