What Happens in Vegas... (2008)

If a bunch of inebriated film school half-wits on the brink of expulsion got together to produce a sex farce in under a week, the results might be comparable to Tom Vaughan's What Happens in Vegas - one of the most unbearable Hollywood comedies of recent years. Ashton Kutcher stars as Jack Fuller, a less-than-polished single Manhattanite whose most favored pastimes consist of kinky sex games with his girlfriend, such as "I'll play the big, strong fireman, and you play the desperate mother with the baby in the burning building." As the film opens, Jack is deservedly and unceremoniously fired from the furniture business by his well-grounded father (Treat Williams). Cameron Diaz co-stars as Joy McNally, a (less-grating) single Manhattanite publicly embarrassed when her yuppie fiancé (30 Rock's Jason Sudeikis) dumps her seconds before she springs a surprise birthday party on him. Each down-and-outer decides to cut his/her losses by high-tailing it to Vegas, where they bump into each other by chance, and take a drunken, headfirst plunge into a long night on the town together. When Joy comes to, the next morning, she sports a ring on her finger - and is horrified to glimpse a sign from Jack referring to her as "wifey." The twist (if one can call it that) occurs when Fuller accidentally hits a $3 million jackpot - and the bickering couple, in an attempt to claim the full share of the money, falls prey to a conservative judge (Dennis Miller) who refuses to grant a divorce and forces the pair to "try out" married life in order to give it an honest chance, freezing all of the monetary assets in the interim. Mirthless, obnoxious and insufferable, this film may well be immune to any sort of normal criticism - so immune that any review threatens to turn into a laundry list of excoriations. First of all, the film operates on an obscenely loud level. The first third of Dana Fox's awful script features scene, after scene, after scene, of characters screaming their lungs out at one another, sprinting around manically, throwing objects at walls and engaging in truly painful, unfunny comic violence - from repeated slugs in the crotch, to sprays of breath freshener in the eye, to the destruction of anything and everything on the screen. A tenth of this would have been fine - instead, we are bombarded with a maelstrom of sound and fury that raises the proverbial "idiot's tale" to a whole new plane. Tonally, both characters repulse from the word go - but particularly the scuzzball Jack, with his sleazy sex games and his irresponsibility at work; Fox and Vaughan not only fail to give us an adequate reason to truly care about either partner - they venture to the other extreme. (Perhaps the best that one can say about this couple - an effect presumably unintended by Fox or Vaughan - is this: each partner reaches a level of such obnoxiousness that they deserve each other in the worst way). On a comedic level, the film never once scores a bulls-eye or earns a genuine laugh - its so-called 'comedic high points' reek of desperation. Consider, for example, Fox's decision to name Diaz's boss (Dennis Farina) Dick Banger (a name repeated on several occasions to wring the most blood out of it) or to name Miller's judge The Honorable R.D. Whopper. Even more troublingly, Fox's humor rests almost exclusively on watching characters physically and psychologically attempt to wield damage against one another - not simply the leads, but everyone onscreen. In more sensitive hands, this could ostensibly work (consider Elaine May's original Heartbreak Kid, for example) but here, we sense no soft edge, no warm center underneath that imparts the characters with even the least iota of compassion or empathy. Obscene humor is difficult to pull off smoothly and deftly; Mel Brooks has a knack for it, and so did the early Working Title films, such as The Tall Guy and Four Weddings & A Funeral. Even Wedding Crashers hit the mark to some degree. Not so for this ugly romp, which bombards the audience with stale and hideous double-entendres that make it feel cheap, tacky and vulgar. On a logical level as well, the film's basic setup proves almost impossible to swallow - Fox hands the audience one implausible twist after another, purely designed to drive the central narrative mechanism forward - from the unlikely "computer mix-up" at the hotel that throws strangers Fuller and McNally into adjoining rooms, to the "convenient" win at the slots that turns Jack into an instantaneous millionaire, to Judge Whopper's absurd ultimatums regarding a trial marriage. Watching What Happens in Vegas is pure misery. How miserable, exactly? One knows that one is in trouble when, halfway through the film, one begins reminiscing about screenings of Peter Chelsom's Town & Country, and then hoping that Dane Cook turns up to drive Kutcher out of the picture. That must certainly represent a new low. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide