Couples Retreat

By Reviewed by Sandra Hall

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I WENT along to Couples Retreat naively hoping that it might have some of the charm of Swingers , the unpretentious independent comedy that catapulted its stars, Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau, into the big time 13 years ago.

This unjustified burst of optimism lasted about two minutes. Admittedly, Vaughn is still playing variations on his Swingers character – the kind who floats through life on a firm belief in the magic of his personality. But the magic is now tarnished from overuse and the script, which he wrote with Favreau, plays as if it's been pasted together out of offcuts from the string of studio rom-coms he's been doing lately.

As for Favreau – maybe it's the effect of his blooming career as a director of blockbusters but the hangdog air that was so appealing in Swingers has now solidified into dourness.

This time, they're playing family men who are persuaded to leave their children with the babysitter and take their wives on a vacation with two other couples. Their friend Jason (Jason Bateman) comes up with the idea. He and his wife Cynthia (Kristen Bell) are contemplating divorce and the resort he's chosen offers marriage counselling which he can afford only if he gets the group discount. Whether or not he needs marriage counselling is another matter. Like everybody in the film, he's a caricature and you can tell what's wrong with his marriage just by looking at it.

He's the pedant of the group. Preferring PowerPoint presentations to conversation, he's driving his wife crazy. Nonetheless, Dave (Vaughn) and his wife Ronnie (Malin Akerman) tactfully refrain from telling him so and the group agree to the trip on the understanding they will be skipping the therapy and devoting their time to having fun.

On this fragile premise, they take off for Eden West, a resort on the island of Bora Bora. On arrival, they're appalled to find themselves at the mercy of a series of therapists who give every sign of having trained for the job on Saturday Night Live .

Under their relentless assault, cracks soon appear in all the marriages. In the case of Favreau's Joey and his wife Lucy (Kristin Davis), it doesn't take much. There's already a yawning crevasse between them, with an emphasis on the yawning bit. Having married straight after high school, they're now chronically bored with one another. He's plotting his escape to Eden East on the other side of the island where singles go to play and she's eyeing every muscular male in sight.

But their friend Shane (Faizon Love) is having an even tougher time. Still hankering after the wife who's just divorced him, he's brought along as consolation his new girlfriend, 20-year-old Trudy, who's decided Eden West is a geriatrics' home. It seems only a matter of time before she too will defect to Eden East.

This leaves Dave and Ronnie as the only couple fit to exemplify the joys of married life. But they've been assigned the most obnoxious of all the therapists and after a couple of wounding sessions, their marriage too is in danger of coming apart.

In the course of all this, the script manages to accommodate every cliche ever found in a vacation resort movie. Along with the embarrassing massage scene, there's the yoga instructor who's taken a degree in compromising positions as well as the group therapy session which requires everybody to take their clothes off. While the film's tone is crass, it's also coy. Unlike the rom-coms of Judd Apatow and the Farrelly Brothers, this one lacks the courage of its own vulgarity.

The only original touch is the casting of baggy-eyed French actor Jean Reno as chief therapist Monsieur Marcel. Not that he can do much. Gamely trying to amuse in kung fu robes and a pigtail, he too flounders, thanks to the witlessness of the dialogue.

The predictable denouement has all the couples taking off for Eden East, where some dancing, flirting and cocktail-drinking ensues. But while the tempo quickens, the laughs remain elusive. It's producer Peter Billingsley's first film as a director and he manages to extract uniformly awful performances from the whole cast.

When the actors are not yelling at one another, they're making po-faced announcements about the challenges of marriage that we're meant to take seriously. You can tell from the soundtrack's sudden lapse in plaintive passages of piano music. The time has come, they say, for you to try to feel something. But this appeal comes too late. I was busy fending off an overwhelming urge to leave the cinema.