Marital problems are a difficult hardship to go through, often ending in pain and suffering. Marital problems would, however, be a welcome reprieve from the pain and suffering brought on by Couples Retreat.
Couples Retreat, directed by Peter Billingsley, is a comedy about four couples who go to an exotic resort, expecting a week of fun and relaxation. When they arrive, they soon realize that their stay is not all fun and games: the point of the vacation is a series of couples’ skill-building exercises. Let the trials and tribulations of the couples commence, with everything ranging from shark attacks to intense Guitar Hero face-offs.
The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), the association that rates and categorizes movies, appears to have taken a vacation on the day that Couples Retreat was proposed. To call this movie a comedy would be to call Titanic an action movie or to call Die Hard a romance. There simply is not enough humor in the movie to earn the title of comedy. So many times throughout its surprising (and unnecessarily long) 113 minute runtime were instances of jokes faltering in a way that shamed its on-screen cast.
This cast is both a blessing and a curse for Couples Retreat. Boasting such massive names as Vince Vaughn (Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story), Jon Favreau (Swingers), Jason Bateman (TV’s Arrested Development), Malin Akerman (Watchmen), Kristen Bell (Forgetting Sarah Marshall), and more, the amount of familiarity the audience can feel with the movie is abundant. The negative side to this is that the director does a horrible job of trying to use each actor equally, whether they are a main character or a supporting character. This leads to an awkward phenomenon of the importance of certain characters randomly spiking in the middle of the story, for reasons that can’t even be explained when the film is over.
Cooperation among the cast is important in any movie, but here, it is more of a competition. All of the actors not only compete for screen time, but it seems that they are constantly vying to be the viewer’s favorite character. None of the actors were content to say, “I acknowledge the fact that I’m not the main character in this story, so I won’t try so hard.” Instead, they said, “I’m not the main character? Let’s just do something about that, shall we?” This subtle yet constant on-screen battle among the actors ruins what could have been a good movie.
Most of the movie’s very few laughs reside in sexual innuendos and implications, which lose their way about halfway through the movie and become annoying. A banana hammock-clad Fabio-look-alike implying sex in the form of yoga can be funny for only so long before it becomes uncomfortable.
Not at all a surprise, critics were not pleased with the sloppy showing that was Couples Retreat. RottenTomatoes.com gave it an astoundingly low 11% on their “Tomato Meter,” and Ellen Fox of The Rotten Tomatoes Show says, “it’s about as much fun as being forced to sit through a timeshare presentation.”
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