Review: ‘Couples Retreat’ gets tag-teamed

Instead of a boring review from one of our crack reviewers, we decided to have TWO crack reviewers do a boring review for Couples Retreat. It’s like you won the lottery but you got only got two movie nerds talking about a romantic comedy instead millions of dollars.

Your humble site chief, Erik (that’s me) is in regular font while Phillip Barrett, our DVD & Blu-Ray Editor is italicized.

It’s easy to pick on romantic comedies. They usually follow a fairly easy paint-by-numbers principle that involves personal worlds falling apart before they can be put back together again with pixie dust and a kiss. Usually everyone goes home happy and the story is wrapped up in a pretty bow. That’s what audiences will also find in the Peter Billingsley directed, Vince Vaughn co-written comedy Couples Retreat, to which I say, “So what?”

“So what?” sort of sums up my thoughts on the film as well. Look, I have nothing against romantic comedies in general and can appreciate decent ones. And to give credit to Couple’s Retreat, it does have a pretty decent cast aside from a bad stereotype. Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau’s script seems to rely more on dick and fart jokes more than any other romcom released this year.

More dick and fart jokes than a typical romcom but far less than your typical Judd Apatow comedy. In fact, Couples Retreat seems pretty clean compared to other adult oriented comedies that have hit the scene the past few years.

It’s not just a Vaughn story. His surrounding cast, who gets more than ample screen time, is also terrific. They should be; they are playing the roles that they always seen to be cast in. Favreau plays a neurotic border-line douche bag while Bateman plays a pretentious know-it-all who is always smarter than everybody else in the room. The female leads in the film do not have room enough to explore anything substantial so they are left to play clichéd parts, such as Bell as the repressed one, Akerman as the wise one and Davis as the horny one.

True, but I’m looking at it in terms of something like The Proposal or Along Came Polly. Apatow can get away with it because we’ve come to expect good stories and character development out of him to mask those jokes. Couples Retreat has the right ingredients to be “Apatow-like” with two solid comedy writers and a great comedic cast. Yet something was lost along the way.

I agree with you about the masking but ain’t for good stories.

Back to Couples Retreat. What may have been lost was something that was never there in the first place: emotional attachment and a reason to root for these relationships. We don’t care about these characters. They could have all been eaten by sharks or or died in a tragic wind-surfing accident and nobody would have really cared except for paying customers wondering where their $20 had gone.

Despite the void of really caring if these saps, it is a refreshing piece that shows the beauty contrasted with the multiple hardships of marriage. It’s done without having rapid-fire poop-flinging thrown at viewers.

I appreciated how heartfelt that aspect was, and yes those are believable struggles as exaggerated they might have been (I did feel a connection to some of their hardships.) admittingly.) But like Erik said, a twenty year-old going to this looking for a fun time isn’t going to appreciate that subtext as they’ve likely never experienced that hardcore a relationship before. It’s because the characters are devoid of any real backbone, so said 20-year old has nothing to identify with.

Author Bio: Erik Buckman is the Managing Editor of Reelloop.com. He likes movies. And rainbows. Maybe sunshine. Follow him on Twitter.