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Dir. Peter Billingsley
Rating: 2.0 | 1 User Review | Send to Friend
By Lance Duroni
This film is the story of three boring white guys; their insanely hot, yet soulless wives; and a black guy who pretends to enjoy hanging out with douchey white dudes so that Vince Vaughn’s character will cosign for his new crotch-rocket. Most of these stick-figure characters were precisely crafted to remind you of each actor’s signature role. Jason Bateman (Jason), for one example, is an incredibly anal pushover who communicates best through PowerPoint presentations (think Michael Bluth turned up to 11, without the quirky family). Bateman’s marriage is on the rocks, so he and his wife convince their friends to attend a swanky couple’s retreat in order to take advantage of the group rate. Upon arriving, the couples with ostensibly happy marriages realize that they too must participate in a ridiculously structured program of therapy and New Age bonding. Attempting to scrape the dark underbelly of committed relationships for laughs, writers Favreau and Vaughn intersperse shock-value jokes with intensely labored tender moments. Vince Vaughn plays a castrated version of his Old School persona, a schmuck whose spinelessness will please overbearing women of all ages. Jon Favreau (Joey) is an awkward meathead who fantasizes about escaping to the adjacent singles resort for a little extramarital physical therapy. Being forced to stare at Favreau’s fat golem-face as he prepares a little jerk-off fort for himself while his wife (Kristin Davis) is in the shower ranks among my top-five most excruciating movie experiences. Worst of all, in her first major role since Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Kristen Bell, playing Jason's wife, again plays a bitchy woman dealing with relationship issues in paradise. Seriously, this chick never even left the island -- she just had a margarita and waited for the next camera crew to show up. To be fair, the film -- written by Favreau and Vaughn, a looooong way from their hard-luck Swingers days -- has its chuckles, but none of them will make amends for the five minute "Guitar Hero" commercial shoehorned into the already pointless plot. Nor will they make up for the pseudo-spiritual rants of Marcel (Jean Reno) -- the gang’s main antagonist, the island’s resident guru, and the personification of fingernails-on-a-chalkboard. A chick flick in Old School clothing, Couple’s Retreat is the kind of insipid Hollywood trash that leaves you praying for earthquakes in the hope that vengeful forces of nature might demolish Tinseltown and allow us to restart the American film industry from scratch.
1 User Review
Rating: 5.0
By: CED
awesome...the review...not the movie
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