Couples Retreat review

Witness another in a long and still growing line of Vince Vaughn crafted comedy mishaps. "Couples Retreat" co-written and produced by Vaughn and Jon Favreau (director of a little franchise called "Iron Man") and starring the pair along with a line very good performers including Kristen Bell, Jason Bateman, Fazion Love, Malin Akerman, Kristin Davis and Jean Reno is utter crap. In fact in many ways it's hard to sit through the whole film because of how crappy and easy it is.
I look at films that have money and potential in the comedy genre that seem to be heading southward and I compare them to two of worst recent ones that exist on this level. "The Love Guru" and "Corkey Ramono"; then I run through a check list of things that connect or disconnect it from those pieces of crap.

After everything it lands above them both and that's solely due to it's beautiful shooting location. The jokes are all unfunny and old hack. Hell they were old hack in 2001 and these actors are simply swimming against the current. Even worse is that some characters and story lines are absolutely unnecessary. That being Fazion Love and his new, 20 year old girlfriend he brings on the trip. Their line of jokes are he's the only black one, he's fat, older and isn't into a lot of the same activities as she is. Her's are she's young, has a touch of that whole 'ghetto-fabulous' air about her and loves to party and have sex. Neither are interesting, funny or realistic. However that last one kind of goes for all the couples.

Vaughn & Akerman... what's funny is Akerman pulls in the most realistic performance in the group and yet isn't once even somewhat funny. Vaughn attempts to deliver long winded rants that as time has shown were funny in movies in which he was not the star, thus every time he opened his mouth we didn't have to listen to it. However in his name movies... except one and usually around a dinner table. And if it's improv then he needs a new schitck. Favreau & Davis' relationship is due to end when their daughter goes to college so they're basically chasing tail the whole movie and Bateman & Bell well they're the reason they and we are involved with this junk, because they're openly considering a divorce. All of those things can be made funny and yet they are incredibly unfunny.

Someone needs to step in and stop allowing Vaughn to work on scripts and producing because this is happening too often('Fred Claus', 'The Break Up', 'Four Christmases'). Add to that this film feels like an epic saga of crap because how stale it is and Oscar winning musician A.R. Rahman ("Slumdog Millionaire") doesn't create one piece of original sounding music for this film. So basically it's controlled by the writers, to some mild extent Peter Billingsley (better known as Ralphie from "A Christmas Story") and the director of photography making the island and women look pretty. For some movies that a major plus. Then again some of those movies are also good.

"Couples Retreat" * 1/2 out of ****