The Guilt Trip Review

The casting is the whole idea and critics agree it is a decent one. Barbra Streisand had not led a film in years and is genuinely good here, playing Joyce as fussy, lonely and sharper than her son gives her credit for, and Rogen underplays to let her work. When the two of them simply talk, the film has something. The trouble is that it almost never does. The screenplay reaches for a road movie and delivers a string of unconnected stops, a steakhouse eating contest, a strip club, a hotel bar, each a self contained sketch that resolves before it can build into anything.

The emotional payoff is signposted in the opening ten minutes and arrives precisely where expected. Anne Fletcher shoots it like a television pilot, brightly lit and shapeless. Nothing here is offensive and nothing is memorable, which is the complaint most reviewers actually make: a competent vehicle with the engine idling. The consensus is that Streisand deserved a return with more nerve than this, and that a two hander only works if somebody writes the two hands something worth saying.