Lowdown: The adventures
of four couples through their week long stay at a relationship mending resort.
Review:
You can tell it is
business as usual at Chez Moshe when we watch ourselves a silly
American film knowing fully well that we are wasting our time. Yes,
the time has come yet again for us to clear our mind using some re-synthesized trash.
Couples Retreat
certainly qualifies in this department. It tells the story of four
middle aged couples, all of them close friends, who follow the
request of one of the couple to join them at a retreat aimed at
healing relationships. They all think they’re going to go to a
resort, but we know better! Yes, they do end up at a resort; but
instead of doing resorty type activities, they are into relationship
analysis and building activities, full time.
Thus our four couples
have to deal with the demons of their relationships: the seemingly
normal couple with kids whose relationship has been forgotten between
the pressures of family and paying the mortgage (Vince Vaughn and
Malin Akerman); the couple whose struggle to conceive is ruining
their relationship (Jason Bateman and Kristen Bell); the high school
sweethearts that cannot stand one another anymore; and the guy whose
wife left him and who is seeking compensation through a twenty year
old. This twisted setup is made even weirder through the
eccentricities of the various resort attendants and their supreme commander (Jean Reno).
Where does all of this
lead to? On the positive side, it leads to a film discussing the
issues commonly affecting the middle aged: the demands of work, the
demands of parenthood, having no time to do anything, and the loss of
the spark that was there at the beginning but is now gone when love
has to leave the stage for real life. Indeed, credit has to be given
to Couples Retreat for dealing with an issue that affects almost
every member of Western societies.
That, however, is where
the credit stops. In typical fashion for an American film, Couples
Retreat has to provide a happy ending even if that happy ending is
more forcibly thrown on the film than particles are inside an
atomic bomb. This can be forgiven if the comic element of the film
worked, but while there is the occasional laugh these laughs are too
far apart. By far the worst offender is the casting: while the men
appear normal for their age, more or less, the women’s side of the
equation is made of models that in no way reflect how the typical
middle aged woman looks like, particularly after giving multiple
births. Come on, how can Malin Akerman be cast as a typical middle
aged mother of two? Where I come from, we call this chauvinism.
Best scene: Vaughn has
to duel an attendant “to the death” in Guitar Hero in order for
the couples to be reunited. I suspect the producers did not
anticipate the demise of the Guitar Hero franchise that shortly
followed the release of their film.
Overall: Typical
Hollywood mildly entertaining trash. 2.5 out of 5 stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment