Could be a GREAT movie, but the end is crap.

Rating: 5/10 (21 March 2011)

If you like the traditional 'happy ending', do not bother with this movie. Run from it.
It starts out with George Clooney, a very selfish man who travels for a living. He travels to fire people. That is his job, and he loves it: not necessarily the firing part, but he loves to travel. He really loves his life - so much so, he hates being home. I guess we are supposed to not like him but oddly, we do and it is for this reason that the movie doesn't work. We WANT him to end up happy.
He starts off with a barren apartment. It is nice and clean but clearly just functional. You can see he spends very little time there. He states he flew 322 days in one year. He has no real roots, other than his job, and no close friends. He travels so he isn't even close to people he works with and although he has two sisters, it is clear that he has been just as distant with them for he barely knows them, either. Yet, we are soon to discover that his younger sister is getting married and it is partly due to this that he starts to rethink his life; this and his meeting a fellow traveler, very much like himself, in the female form.
He and she hit if off right away and decide to hook up whenever their flight paths cross. She is likable too so you really want to see these two end up together. He invites her to his sister's wedding, shows her his high school and then he talks his future brother-in-law into going through with the wedding when he starts to gets cold feet. You can see it coming. He is thinking that having someone special isn't such a bad thing.
THIS IS A BIG SPOILER. IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW HOW THE MOVIE ENDS, STOP READING HERE.
A day or two after the wedding he decides to throw his old lifestyle away and he goes to the woman's home. He has decided that love and marriage are good things and that maybe he could, or should, give them a try. We are glad to see it. We're hopeful and yet, my husband and I were both thinking the same thing as he approached the woman's house - what if she's married... and she is. She even has kids! Talk about feeling defeated! The rest of the movie gets no better and we're left feeling totally cheated.
I'd like to ask, why couldn't this have ended happily? Why couldn't he go to her, and she run to him, and have it all end the way most people want? Yes, I know there will always be a few who will disagree, but I do believe that there are less of them. We like him, we like her. They seem perfect together. Get it people?! Get them together! Leave your audience with a good feeling - but no, not our modern Hollywood. They have to leave us with disgust, and we wonder why movies suck today? This is why.
Hollywood refuses to give the audience what they want. 'They' know better what entertains, right? WRONG! We don't need to be taught that sh-- happens, we live in the world too yet years ago when Hollywood could write, movies delivered what they were meant to; pure escapism. Where are the Ingrid Bergmans, the Cary Grants? Even comedy today stinks. Writers knew, back then, how to write SCHTICK and it was funny. The Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello! Toilet humor is all we get now-a-days and I for one am sick of it.
Give me the CLASSIC movies of the 1940s. They knew their trade and when you walked out of a theater you didn't feel like you were throwing your money away. You invested your hard-earned-dollar and your time into something that delivered. UP IN THE AIR could have been a great movie but modern Hollywood ruined it just like most of the trash made in Hollywood today.