WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS
If you’ve checked in on the NBA playoffs on TNT, it’s hard to avoid commercials for this movie. Do they really think we only watch about ten minutes of a game and wouldn’t be bothered by fifty plugs for this movie? Sort of made me root for this one to fail – well, it probably isn’t necessary for me to get involved, this one’s pretty flat without my help. Jack and Joy are the crazy couple, played by Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz. It’s a case of opposites – she’s a career driven control freak, he’s a slacker. Dumped by her boyfriend, she heads to Vegas for a getaway. Dumped by his father, Jack does the same thing. Of course, they’re accompanied by their best buds, Tipper and Hader. Sorry, that’s the characters names – Tipper, played by Lake Bell (yeah, that’s her name), and Hader, played by Rob Corddry (yep, two “D’s”). Oh, these two are opposites too, but here’s something interesting – they’re funnier than Jack and Joy. And that is never a good sign for movie – when the “supporting” cast is more entertaining than the main stars.
Anyway, they’re all in Vegas, and a wild night ensues, and blah, blah, blah, move forward, suddenly Jack and Joy wake up married. Didn’t they do this on the sitcom “Friends”, and maybe fifty other sitcoms and movies before this?
Well, that’s another problem – this one played like a TV sitcom that went on for over ninety minutes. And not a sitcom you want to sit through three episodes of – you see, as they agree to get a divorce, Jack hits the “jackpot” on a slot machine! So, now they have three million reasons to stay together, and the rest of the movie is about each one plotting to get all the money. Yep, it’s not too deep, but comedies don’t have to be.
If you have seen the commercials as I have while watching the NBA, you have already seen the funniest snippets, and believe me, they’re snippets. To drive each other away from the marriage and to get all the money, he urinates in the kitchen sink and removes the toilet seat, she hires prostitutes to lure him into infidelity. Watching over all of this is Queen Latifah as the marriage counselor directed by the court to keep these two in line. Which made me think, why didn’t they just split the money and be done with it?
All of this made me appreciate the moments between Tipper and Hader- at least they were quick and to the point with their nastiness. I remember, it was forty-five minutes in, pretty much the halfway point for the movie, and they were doing a scene where they were trying to outrace each other to the marriage counselor’s office, and they end up running through a park and battering each other with bread loaves, it was then that I thought “is there no end in sight”? A quick glance at my watch told me the answer.
It wasn’t for a lack of trying – Kutcher and Diaz are adequate comic actors, although she’s always stuck playing the high strung girl with the inner party maniac waiting to escape, and he’s the goofball with the stammer. Casting Dennis Farina as her boss and Treat Williams as his Dad wasn’t a bad idea, because sooner or later, you know this one is going to get serious and romantic, and those two lent some credibility to that notion, but in the end, it plays out pretty predictably and very forced.
It’s a sitcom plot played out over and over, with each one trying to outdo the other, and would have worked better if I could have shut off the TV after each half hour and come back in a week, but this one drives straight through and into a wall. This summer’s “romantic comedy hit” it is not – I give “What Happens In Vegas” a “4.0” on the scale.
