Demmie Todd Amanda Peet and Zach Braff star in "The Ex."

By Barbara Vancheri, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Scrubs" star Zach Braff has become the go-to guy for movies about rites of passage.

		'The Ex' Starring: Zach Braff, Amanda Peet. Director: Jesse Peretz. Rating: PG-13 for sexual content, brief language and a drug reference. Web site: www.theexmovie.com/ Related article Family Film Guide: 'The Ex'

In "Garden State," he was a struggling actor who returns home for his mother's funeral. In "The Last Kiss," he was engaged to be married to his pregnant girlfriend but secretly dreading the impending end of his single lifestyle.

Now, in "The Ex," he is Tom, a New York chef blissfully married to his very pregnant wife, a lawyer named Sofia (Amanda Peet). He gets into a food fight with his obnoxious boss and is fired just before his wife goes into labor.

Sofia gives birth to a son, but their plans -- she would become a stay-at-home mom, he would support the family -- turn to ashes. Tom, already an inveterate job-hopper, suggests perhaps it's time that they move to her Ohio hometown and accept her father's offer to join his advertising agency.

But once they get there, Tom finds himself being "mentored" by Chip (Jason Bateman), a high school classmate of Sofia. He still carries a torch for her, secretly sabotages Tom at every turn and happens to use a wheelchair, which makes it difficult for Tom to criticize him without feeling guilty or ostracized.

"The Ex," a comedy with lots of familiar faces in small roles -- such as Paul Rudd, Donal Logue, Amy Adams and Amy Poehler -- starts off with recycled jokes about baby names and epidurals. It eventually veers into more unconventional territory, although it milks laughs from Braff being smacked with a snowboard or wheelchair.

It's both a bit edgy and rough around the edges, clocking in at 89 minutes, but it has moments that may make you laugh aloud and two actors who are scene-stealers.

They are Bateman, at his smooth, smarmy best, and Lucian Maisel as Wesley, a boy spending the summer with his divorced dad. His father won't let him watch television, so he parks himself at Tom and Sofia's next door, devouring Twizzlers and junk TV. He has a particular skill you have to see to believe and to think, "That can't be healthy."

"The Ex," which originally was called "Fast Track" (both are pretty horrible titles), is the first produced screenplay from Dave Guion and Michael Handelman, who met at Yale and drew upon some of their office temp work to create the agency where Tom, his father-in-law (Charles Grodin, with "Rosemary's Baby" co-star Mia Farrow as his wife) and Chip work.

They and director Jesse Peretz ("The Chateau") tackle lots of subjects here: birth, parenthood, moving back to a hometown, mommy-and-baby groups, a new job, a duplicitous co-worker, marriage counseling, the free-spirited world of advertising and karmic payback.

That's ambitious, and sometimes they hit a bull's-eye and sometimes their arrows land in the weeds or predictable places. Although most of the movie takes place in Ohio, it was shot in New York, so it fails to take advantage of its fictional location, other than making sure the license plates are right.

"The Ex" is far from a perfect comedy but it has a winning cast and an everyman the audience will root for, even as he steps into yet another pothole on the road to adulthood.