Word: retreats
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...there movies nobody likes but everyone sees? Yes, especially over weekends when only one major-studio film is released. That seemed to be the case with Couples Retreat, the Vince Vaughn comedy that received a flatulent 13% on Rotten Tomatoes' survey of critics' reviews and a mediocre B rating from CinemaScore's poll of exiting moviegoers. Yet by Sunday night, according to early estimates, it will have earned $35.4 million, the top gross ever for a movie on Columbus Day weekend...
...weren't for the memory of how fresh and joyful their 1996 film Swingers was, the Jon Favreau-Vince Vaughn comedy Couples Retreat might seem like any other broad, dumb movie - the kind Ben Stiller churns out with alarming regularity - with a sizable budget; a gorgeous location; funny dudes; pretty, bikini-ready women; and plenty of sex jokes. Not great but not terrible. But this movie, which plays out like the fulfillment of the Swingers dudes' worst nightmares, is just sad. (See TIME's fall entertainment preview...
...Couples Retreat was co-written by Vaughn and Favreau, with an assist from Dana Fox, and it has the choppiness you'd expect from too many cooks in the kitchen (in contrast, Favreau was the only screenwriter on Swingers). I'm fine with the original Trent ("money") and Mike (not "money," no matter what Trent said) moving to the suburbs, having kids, getting fat and spending weekends at Home Depot and Applebee's. These things happen. What's depressing is that there's hardly a creative spark in this sour, offensive, contrived story, and its sloppiness is more consistent than...
...idea of a happy ending might entail Joey being devoured by sharks somewhere east of Eden. Instead we get marital resolutions based on the fear that nothing is worse than being alone at Applebee's on a Friday night. Lucy may beg to differ by the time Couples Retreat: Return to Eden opens...
...agree (most likely minus a small Commander in Chief tax to show who's really in charge). But if McChrystal can't promise something resembling success by 2012, look for Obama to shift to a more modest strategy, with more modest goals, and paint it as realism rather than retreat...