Peter Billingsley’s “Couples Retreat” is an overly-long, overly-formulaic attempt at a romantic comedy. It has the feeling of a film trying to play it so safe that it gets to the point where we can tell exactly what the characters are going to do for the entire film within the first ten minutes. I say “attempt” at romantic comedy because that is all it is, an attempt, which lacks both romance and comedy.
The story focuses on four couples, three of which appear happy together in their everyday lives. However, one of these couples, Jason (Jason Bateman) and Cynthia (Kristen Bell), realize that there is a problem in their relationship, so they try to convince the other couples to come with them on an island retreat. They tell them that they can choose whether to partake of the couples workshops or not and instead focus on the fun activities that the island has to offer. Plus, if they all go together, it’s half price.
Once Jason convinces his friends, Dave (Vince Vaughn) and Ronnie (Malin Akerman), to come, the rest follow suit, but they soon find that the couples skill building is not an option, at least not at the part of the resort that they are staying at, West Eden (The fun and games happen on the singles’ side, West Eden). Not long after they begin their therapy sessions, the other couples soon realize that they too may have a few problems.
I find that I rarely have to make a complaint about the length of a film, but “Couples Retreat” is much longer than it needed to be. It runs about 109 minutes and makes you feel every minute of it. The filmmakers could have easily cut out about 20-30 minutes of the film, leaving what little plot there is fully intact. They obviously didn’t have enough material to fill this time, making the film feel as though it is stretched very thin and even longer by sticking to the standard romantic comedy formula.
That was the film’s other big problem: there is nothing in it that can’t be seen coming from a mile away. The couples come to the island and realize they have problems, so, of course, we can expect the obligatory scenes of fighting amongst the couples, scenes where we think that they are going to break up, emotional heart-to-heart talks, and the eventual reconciliation. There are no surprises because they are stuck on a very familiar path.
Along the way, they try to infuse humor into it, but fail at almost every turn. There are a few moments that garner a smirk, but nothing that actually gets a big laugh, or even a little one. Most of the big set-ups and one-liners are met with awkward silences. The actors try their best to make it seem funnier than it is, but it seems that even they know that the material is just not funny enough.
The first act starts off alright, aside from some low-brow bathroom humor, and once they get to the island, it continued to be an average film, but then it quickly loses its way for the entire second and third acts. It stops being the least bit interesting (not that it really was in the first place) when it suddenly becomes about trying to find one of the character’s, Shane (Faizon Love), girlfriend, Trudy (Kali Hawk).
They mount a kind of rescue mission to the other side of the resort, the singles’ side, and act like they really want to find Trudy, but are not too convincing in hiding their desire to go their to party. While traveling to the island, they have awkward conversations about how terrible they are at being husbands just based on recent events at the resorts, all the while they are trying to go party under the guise of looking for Trudy, Shane being the only one serious about doing so.
The romance never truly comes alive because we know exactly where it is going and how it will end up. It certainly doesn’t help that the characters never develop and that they feel like two-dimensional cardboard cutouts. In the end, we don’t care about these characters and their relationships at all, partly because we have seen what kind of people they are.
With the talent involved in this project, Vince Vaughn (who now has another entry in his long list of terrible comedies), Jon Favreau, and Jean Reno (as the workshop instructor), this could have been something decent at the very least, but it decides to forgo trying anything the least bit original and instead falls back on formulas and clichés and takes the comedy and romance right out of the equation.
2/4 stars.