'Your Place or Mine' review: Don't choose either one

WHAT IT'S ABOUT Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher star in the romantic comedy "Your Place or Mine," and you don't have to be a seasoned genre expert to know exactly where things are going after the first minute. 

She's Debbie, he's Peter. She lives in Los Angeles; he's got a fancy (but sterile) apartment in DUMBO, Brooklyn. They were briefly romantic in 2003 and have spent the past 20 years being the best of friends, always there for each other, but strangely and implausibly content with keeping things platonic.

When Debbie signs up for an accounting class in New York and Peter suffers from a bout of career anxiety, the timing seems right for one of those classic cinematic archetypes: a home swap. She heads to Brooklyn, while Peter goes west to spend the week with Debbie's preteen son, Jack (Wesley Kimmel).

Veteran screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna ("The Devil Wears Prada") scripts and makes her directorial debut. Supporting actors include Steve Zahn, Zoë Chao, Tig Notaro and Jesse Williams.

MY SAY The stakes could not be lower in "Your Place or Mine." It's another one of those movies where everyone but the main characters can see they're meant to be together, and the only drama derives from the question of when that inevitable revelation will set in.

That same basic formula underpins a lot of romantic comedies, of course, and it has worked well many times before. But there has to be a compelling journey toward that destination.

This picture fails to meet that standard, unless you're that rare viewer who might be seriously engaged in, say, Peter and Jack watching "Alien" against mom's wishes, or Debbie trying to make sense of the iPad that controls the devices in Peter's apartment.

As if that weren't enough, we get lifeless scenes with Debbie's rival love interest Theo Martin (Williams), including stilted dialogue about their favorite authors set against the backdrop of glamorous city real estate.

Zahn plays a quirky gardener who comes across as a bad sitcom's idea of a hippie. He spends the entire movie hanging out in Debbie's yard, wearing a goofy hat and strumming his guitar. Notaro has her share of deadpan one-liners as a friend of both main characters. She does what she can, but she can't do much.

There's another fundamental missing here: lead actors with any sort of chemistry. It might have helped had the actors been given more scenes together, but the characters spend nearly the whole movie with an entire continent between them.

Witherspoon is right at home in this sort of movie, a pro at playing a modern woman juggling her needs, responsibilities and desires. But Kutcher brings nothing to the part, not so much as a hint of an inner life. So it's hard to understand what Debbie sees in Jack as a best friend, let alone as a romantic partner.

BOTTOM LINE The movie seems almost purposefully inconsequential.