Rated: PG-13
Runtime: 1 hr 39 mins
Cast:
- Cameron Diaz
- Ashton Kutcher
- Rob Corddry
- Lake Bell
- Treat Williams
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Review - "What Happens in Vegas"
Reviewer: Kim Langcake
Rating:
In the opening scenes of What Happens in Vegas, career girl Joy McNally (Cameron Diaz) is unceremoniously dumped by her high-flying stockbroker fiancé while walking him into his carefully arranged surprise birthday party. At the same time, in another part of New York, slobby carpenter and general good-time guy Jack Fuller (Ashton Kutcher) has just been fired from the family business by his own father. In time-honored style, they each grab their besties and head to Las Vegas to prove that drinking enough alcohol and gambling enough money will make a person forget anything: wayward fiancés, career crises, even, apparently, hooking up with someone who looks like Cameron Diaz or Ashton Kutcher and marrying them a few hours later.
There is nothing wrong with a good movie cliché. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. Boy meets girl, girl falls ill and stages prolonged heart-wrenching death scene, preferably with beatific smiles and small, weeping children involved. Gorgeous hooker who looks just like Julia Roberts gets paid $3000 to spend a week drinking champagne and going to the opera with Richard Gere and his credit card. You get the picture. Human beings need escape and fairy tales. We can see the same story in all manner of permutations many times on screen and, if it's done well enough and we care about the people involved, we don't get sick of it. With this in mind, and with the talent involved, What Happens in Vegas should have been an engaging and funny romantic comedy. That it falls so far short of the mark shows just how lazy studios have become in dishing out these movies. Bogie and Bacall this ain't.
In What Happens in Vegas, the boy meets, and marries, girl scenario is followed by some severe post-nuptial morning-after regret, an argument about who is dumping whom, and a freak lucky shot on a slot machine which wins Jack $3 million. As newlyweds with no sign of a pre-nup, a fierce battle ensues about who should get the winnings. Dennis Millers' Judge Whopper (I kid you not) refuses to give the new couple an annulment, and he instead sentences them to "six months of hard marriage". He also rules that the money be put into no-man's land until the six months is up. Being forced to live together in Jack's barely-habitable hovel, there follows scene after scene of pranks and sabotage, "War of the Roses" style, but without the wit of Danny De Vito. Even Lake Bell and Rob Corddry, in the usual sure-fire funny best friend roles, are stifled by the lacklustre script, and Queen Latifah shows once again that the contract she has with her agent appears not include actually reading scripts before signing up.
The formulaic style of this join-the-dot rom-com is as rigid as Gerard Butler's abs, but unfortunately not nearly as good to look at on the big screen. Director Tom Vaughan seems to have been unable to coach a kilowatt of warmth out of any of his actors — although Diaz's strange orange color should have indicated otherwise. Next time a makeup person comes near you with the fake tan bottle, run Cameron, run. A prolonged scene with neat-freak Joy demonstrating to Joe how to use a toilet seat is desperately unfunny and highlights how off-pace both the actors and script are in this film. Dana Fox's screenplay is big on scatological humour and crude language, but very mean on wit and heart, and it doesn't need to be this way. Judd Apatow and Jason Segel demonstrated in their recent respective hits Knocked Up and Forgetting Sarah Marshall that gross-out frat humor and character development aren't mutually exclusive, and they were able to produce outrageous, double-over funny movies about people you came to care for. Unfortunately for Vegas, both the laughter and the character engagement are missing.
By the time What Happens in Vegas plods its way to a very predictable end, you may end up wanting your own legal separation from all of the annoying and unfunny people in this film. A sprinkle of cringe-inducing gambling metaphors such as "you bet on me and made me want to bet on myself" should seal the deal. What Happens in Vegas really should have stayed there.
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