Do you constantly find yourself snooping through your friends’ pictures on Facebook after they just got back from vacation? Does the thought of people with relationship issues whinging and bitching in therapy sound like a pure blast of awesome? My friend, have I got a movie for you!
Couple’s Retreat is yet another collaboration between Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau. The Swingers duo have been pretty much inseparable since their 1996 debut, and this 2009 release shows no sign of them stopping anytime soon.
Staring down the barrel of a divorce, Jason and Cynthia (Jason Bateman and Kristen Bell) hope to attend a couple’s resort paradise to fix their marriage. The only snag? It apparently costs a crazy amount of money. However, if they can convince their fellow couple friends to go (Jon Favreau, Vince Vaughn and others), the group rate will put their adventure-in-monogamy nicely into a more comfortable price range.
So, convince the friends they do, and then it’s off to a random tropical destination. However, the extra couples soon discover that the therapy sessions they thought were optional are incredibly mandatory and the wild partying a bit of a no-no. So, with our would-be vacationers forced to attend couple’s therapy, problems emerge, tension is created, and hilariousness is assured. Hmm. Not so much the last one? Well two out of three ain’t bad.
The film simply is not funny. Sure, there is a random chuckle here and there, but all in all, the 113 minutes of run time are fairly dry and rely on the audience to equate absurd situations to side-splitting humour. A heavy emphasis of the script is placed on Vaughn’s usual brand of rambling shtick, but despite the multitude of words vomiting out of his mouth, Vaughn never actually says anything funny.
All of this is actually quite a shame because Couple’s Retreat is a film that showed a lot of promise from the trailer. The premise seemed likeable enough, and set against a beautiful tropical setting with a group of familiar faces, the assurance of a fairly enjoyable movie was pretty much assumed. But how wrong we were. Oh how wrong we were.
The couples themselves have passable chemistry, with Vince Vaughn and Malin Akerman being the most believable. As well, Favreau and Vaughn bring their real-life comradery to the screen and most of the scenes with the two ex-Swingers work because of it. However, these occasional moments of charm were hardly enough to patch together a poorly written script, and even the most diehard Vaughn fan will be left wanting.
Overall, Couple’s Retreat feels like a good premise executed poorly. Perhaps Favreau should have watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall before penning this little masterwork (you know, that other tropical rom-com starring Kristen Bell). I can’t help but feel that if he did, a genuine laugh or two would have resulted and I wouldn’t be left wondering what else I could have done in the nearly two hours I wasted on this film.
I hear snorting Pop-Tarts is quite the trip.
