Couples Retreat

Sorry everyone that I have not posted in a couple days, but life has been busy here as I have been out of town. On Monday night we relaxed before I went out of town by watching Couples Retreat starring Vince Vaughn. While this movie had its funny moments it really struggled to be a consistently funny comedy. This movie took some great comedians, a group of hard working actresses and a tropical location and for me fell flat on its face. An interesting controvery that has come out of this movie was that of the movie poster in the UK. For some reason they decided to take the African American couple off the poster.

For me Vince Vaughn gave a couple of great one liners while in the domestic location, but the movie struggled to be funny during the rest of the film. As many times in todays day and age they seemed to try to rely on crude humor that does not come off as funny. Many times they move immediately to crude humor because that will get the laughs out of the juvenile teenagers.

The whole premise of the movie centers around four couples going to this island paradise as part of a couples skills building seminar with one of the couples going to work on their marriage and the others not realizing that participation is mandatory and that they can not relax and just have the fun like they planned. Of course, as they go through the therapy it is apparent that all the couples have issues that really but their marriages in jeopardy for the majority of the movie. And then in a very unbelievable way immediately all four of the couples solve their problems in the last ten minutes of the movie in a very unorthodox way. While I understand that resolving all of the relationships gives the good feeling ending that everyone desires it would be more effective if we could see a gradual resolution rather then the immediate change in the relationships that happens.

To me the biggest disappointment in this movie was the "Guitar Hero" duel. While this could have been a great moment of comedy this did a complete bellyflop and went way too cheesy that made the scene painfully unfunny and stupid. This movie ended up falling short because either the screenplay writing really was weak or the actors adblibbed too much in trying to be funny and did not play off each other as well as would be expected. Jason Bateman, delivered a very lackluster performance that was far from what would be expected of him. Also they definitely struggled as the chemistry between each couple was not believable.

If you are in the mood for inane, mindless comedic action then this just may be a movie worth renting. Be warned that there are a lot of innuendo based jokes. While this movie may be worht the redbox rental if you are in the mood, I would suggest really making sure you are in the mood for mindless movies. For this movie I am only giving it one and a half buckets of popcorn.

-The Movie Man-