Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau Should Have Retreated from Couples Retreat

Comments (0) By Nick Pinkerton Thursday, Oct 8 2009

Couples, retreat. In the latest from Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau (co-starring and co-writing), we learn that one compelling reason to make a life commitment is so you will always have someone to eat with at Applebee’s.

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The movie’s cumulative idea is that, forgetting the delusions of midlife panic, this is all there is, you’re already living the best possible life — a message of sedentary wisdom betrayed when the actual film is as undeniably dreary as a plate of gummy Chicken Parmesan Tanglers.

Vaughn, Favreau (flagrantly shirtless), Jason Bateman, and Faizon Love are four buddies, just “regular guys”—meaning, as always, puffy, dull-minded lunks, with Vaughn increasingly being Jim Belushi’s heir-apparent. They take their respective significant others on a group vacation to an island paradise, along with maybe 12 pages of sitcomic script outline, to be riffed out into feature length.

Arriving at the Eden Resort, our beer-commercial heroes are menaced by enforced couple's therapy and the resort’s staff of Speedo-wearing homo-macho Euro-Hispanic Others (Jean Reno, Carlos Ponce), who put them through yoga humpings and reality-TV-type challenges intended to renew the spark missing from their relationships.

The presence of Bateman begs comparison with the funnier-while-thematically-similar Extract, though Retreatalso recalls Voyage in Italy, if Rossellini replaced intimate human insight with lowest-common-denominator doody-boner-bare butt-jackoff haw-haws.