No, given the light vanilla flavorings of the “Couples Retreat” trailer, one can’t really be surprised that this rom com is an intolerable mish-mash of half-written and halfhearted gags, but christ. With a cast full of improv-heavy riffers like Vincent Vaughn, Jon Favreau and Jason Bateman (all part of the “The Break-Up” crew, an underrated little comedy of that ilk) one would hope that asking for a few, mildly diverting moments wouldn’t be too much to ask.
Yet it is. From this lazily thrown together and poorly written excuse of a comedy, it’s asking a lot. Completely mirthless, edited like a fourth grader with threads left dangling everywhere (though really, do you really even care?) “Couples Retreat,” attempts to say something about love and marriage from the 40-something crowd (the new ’30s) and comes up empty-handed with hackneyed cliches, eye-rolling platitudes and cheap sentimentality. All these people can be great comedic actors, but there’s zero chemistry to be found throughout. What becomes more important than story or even laughs is seemingly random, thrown together moments like a scene out-of-nowhere, that spends about five minutes in a Guitar Hero showdown (basically just a blatant commercial for the game). Product placement is rampant throughout as well and it’s just painfully obvious.
There’s no point in getting into a review proper. It’s a waste of time for all of us. But the bullet points you should be aware of lest you’re silly enough to burn away your time and money on this banal and tired endeavor: there are maybe 1-2 mild chuckles to be gained in the hour and a half that you spend with these characters (stock leftover bits you’ve all seen them play before, especially the males) and that’s being incredibly generous. Vince Vaughn tries to do his crazy riffing thing that generally provides laughs (if you’re going to spit all over a target with a hose, eventually you’re going to land some zingers), but here his well has dried up and he actually seems like he’s trying to rein it in, portraying one of the more (relatively) mature men on “problem” island. That idea is sensible for trying to do something different, yet it’s bad for those of us who are desperate for any kind of laughs.
While you don’t expect the directing (or any of it, really) to be high art, you do expect a film to be a least semi-competent. First time director Peter Billingsley does a safe, semi-passable job, but whoever his editors were should have their Guild cards revoked because they do nothing to help out poor transitions, jarring breaks to the next scene and the overall narrative gaps. Maybe the sentiment is simply, “aww, its a comedy, don’t worry dude,” and yes, generally one will let sloppy fluidity go in a light comedy, but this picture is largely such a mess of mismatched shots and cuts that even your average plebe is going to notice the incoherence moving from scene to scene.
If “Couples Retreat,” has one thing going for it, it’s that its intentions seem somewhat sound. These guys might have simply wanted to write themselves into a paid, working vacation with friends, but this film pains itself to not just center on immature manchild laughs, and attempts to import some weight to the difficulties and obstacles of marriage. While the attempt is duly noted, they might have just stuck to the dumb laughs as the execution is pedestrian, unclever and banal. Plus, the writers and filmmakers never actually stick to their maturing theme. One second the men are jackasses, the next they’re trying to lead the others by example. Because “laughs” (a very relative term here) are paramount to “story,” right? And the ladies — Malin Akerman, Kristin Davis, Kristen Bell — Christ, they stand around, look pretty, become exasperated by their asshole husbands’ behavior (cause they basically do nothing wrong throughout) and drink Mai Tais. The sentiments throughout are always puddle deep: if you brave through the rough, choppy waters of relationships, you’ll eventually arrive at the island where everything is happy! Man, we expect much more from Favreau and Vaughn.
We’ve already wasted too many words. Give your dollars a rest. You’d be better off buying dish soap or giving yourself a home colonoscopy. Painful, a waste of time and unfunny. It’s soberingly bad. [D-]