How nice it must be to take a working vacation to Tahiti and Bora Bora with your best pals and have it paid for by a movie studio! Sure, the studio expects you to make a movie in return. But hey, it doesn't have to be good. And oh, Couples Retreat is very, very far from anything resembling good.
The Swingers dudes are no longer 'money." So longtime friends and Swingers co-stars Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn got together with their pal, kid actor-turned director Peter Billingsley (who produced Favreau's TV series Dinner for Five), slapped together a script about four couples at a luxury resort that forces them to undergo marriage counseling as part of the package, and then made a movie that's contrived, sloppy, and downright offensive in its stupidity. If Swingers was a canny look at guys in their early 30's, Couples Retreat is a distillation of every idiotic cliche about guys in their 40's. Honestly, if the vapid, self-obsessed, immature fools they play here in any way reflect the sort of people Favreau and Vaughn have actually become, they should be deeply ashamed.
Two hours is a long time to be stuck watching a sitcom. In classic bad comedy tradition, the set-up introduces us to eight mono-dimensional character types who would never be friends in real life. Jason and Cynthia (Jason Bateman and Kristen Bell) are the highly strung professionals who convince their pals to join them on vacation. Dave and Ronnie (Vaughn and Malin Ackerman) are the generally happy parents of a couple of small kids, who have found that their busy life has impacted their marriage. Their friend Shane (Faizon Love) is divorced, and brings along his 20-year-old girlfriend Trudy (Kali Hawk), who calls him "Daddy." And Favreau plays Joey, whose marriage to Lucy (Kristin Davis) has grown increasingly bitter since he knocked her up in high school. With the exception of Ackerman's character, all of them are annoying -- in the case of Favreau's Joey, whose entire shtick involves his desire to cheat on his wife, masturbation jokes and erection humor, he's so unpleasant that he deserves a punch in the face.
How many times must a joke be repeated before its funny? In the case of a very long set piece involving the eight principals taking a yoga lesson, ten or twelve swipes at the same thing still results in failure. See, the yoga instructor is a hot Latin fellow (Carlos Ponce) who's so muscular that he looks like a bunch of sausages glued on top of even more sausages. His form of yoga involves a lot of grinding and humping, so -- see if you can follow here -- it looks like sex! And these guys are all straight! And he's doing it to their wives, too! No, it's not any funnier on screen, trust me.
And yet, Vince Vaughn is still a comic genius. What few real laughs there are in the film come from scenes in which Vaughn goes off on his familiar stream-of-consciousness rambles. They sound ad-libbed and, considering how much funnier these moments are than anything else that happens, they probably are. As a result, I found myself thinking yet again how much fun it probably would be to hang out with Vaughn and have a few drinks. Much more enjoyable, no doubt, than suffering through Couples Retreat.