Review of Couples Retreat (2009) by Matthew K — 15 Aug 2013

I keep returning to watch this film as a sort of guilty pleasure, it's not that great by any sense of the word, but it's a dumb comedy that does have a few laughs, however cheap they may be. This, and the fact that it has a reasonably likeable cast, quite a nice selection of comedy names, namely Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau, a man whom is growing on me more and more, he's not that bad at comedy acting actually.

The sickeningly cheesy montage of the couples at the beginning of the film sets the tone for the entire film, so you don't really have to put any effort into decoding the old plot. We'll meet the couples, then I'm quite sure there'll be problems along the way. They may attend some sort of class, or go to some retreat, and they'll get over it and be stronger than ever as a result. Nailed it. A rather lame way to tell a story, very, very safe. For me the film was definitely about the characters, and the story driven by them. Definitely the two best characters are Vaughn and Favreau and the banter that they have between themselves, and their characters in general are the funniest I found. They definitely made the film a little bit more bearable, especially when the film resorts to very crude toilet humour, on more than one occasion to get some laughs.

The combination of the friends keeps the film interesting, they all have different problems as couples which at least tries to keep the film moving. Feeding off generic family problems, overprotective fathers, young children, marriages that have stagnated, partners being too different, and too similar et al. Despite all of this lame stuff, Vaughn kept the film moving I thought, he's just a funny man. He drags the film along, and at some points, well, quite a few points, it feels as though he is carrying the film solely, and most of the focus is on him, fair enough as he is the main star on the poster, but it's all about him.

I think the weirdest thing about the film was seeing Temuera Morrison as anything other than a clone or Jango Fett, and when he is made to say the word 'drawers', just doesn't feel right. Speaking of strange characters, I could not stand the whole Bateman-Bell combination. They were just very annoying and didn't make up for that with funniness, they were the least funny out of them all, which was quite disappointing as I do happen to like them as actors, oh well.

In general the film just suffered from sloppy directing and sloppy continuity mistakes, when they're having the counselling when they sit backwards and then forwards for example, simple things! Then there were the MovieMaker-esque editing during the Guitar Hero sequence, the whole idea of trying to mimic the styling of the game just came off terribly, with very low resolution graphics and then the dreadful split screen. Hollywood filmmaking or A Level Media Studies? On top of this, the narration structure was pretty uncreative, everything went wrong at the same time and then miraculously everything went right at the same time, flicking between each. During some of the scenes I was left genuinely questioning their poignancy, as in they could have never been filmed, and no one would miss them.

All in all it's a pretty dull and predictable film. Not a great example of the generic romcom genre, but oh well, it's here now. May as well watch it for the Vaughn-Favreau combo and leave it at that, and also be amazed at how it's almost two hours!