Comedies have a simple task: Make the audience laugh. For What Happens in Vegas, it seems everyone involved forgot.
Mired from beginning to end by an absurd premise, awkward dialogue and mindless humor, director Tom Vaughan (Starter for 10) has combined with Cameron Diaz (The Holiday) and Ashton Kutcher (The Guardian) to seemingly accomplish the impossible: Create a film with absolutely no redeemable qualities.
What Happens in Vegas follows two New Yorkers whose paths cross when they are forced to take unexpected detours in their lives. Joy (Diaz), a successful Wall Street trader, is madly in love with her fiancé, Mason (Jason Sudeikis, Saturday Night Live), but Mason thinks a marriage between them would never work. Across the city, the younger Jack (Kutcher) is an underachieving slacker whose apathetic ways finally catch up with him when his father, Jack Sr. (Treat Williams, Heartland), fires him from his job.
Uncertain, miserable and disappointed, Joy and Jack each resolve that a trip to Sin City will be the perfect remedy to their problems. When a glitch at their hotel books them and their friends (Rob Corddry, Semi-Pro, and Lake Bell, Over Her Dead Body) in the same room, the group decides to embark together on a frivolous night of partying on the Las Vegas strip.
When the pair wakes up, they realize they unwittingly tied the knot the night before and must deal with the consequences. But before they part ways, Jack just so happens to win $3 million at the slots with Joy’s quarter. When they decide to split the money as part of their divorce agreement, however, a fire-and-brimstone judge (Dennis Miller, Thank You for Smoking) absurdly sentences them to “hard marriage,” freezing the money until they prove they lived together for six months and attempted to honor their vows.
The central issue with What Happens in Vegas is the filmmakers made a movie about adult problems, but only used rudimentary humor. The slapstick comedy and personal hygiene jokes come at an unfathomable rate, and though some films may be laden with comedic misfires, writer Dana Fox (The Wedding Date) has managed to pen a story that does not draw a single laugh throughout its 99-minute duration.
It’s simply bewildering to see how many gags featuring Jack peeing in the sink or eating popcorn out of his pants made it into the film, but the real question is how the outlandish plot became a movie in the first place. The storyline, which follows the Sweet Home Alabama formula of binding a successful New York businesswoman with a deadbeat husband, manages to create a contradictory situation where every narrative twist is somehow ridiculous – yet completely expected.
Audiences may also need their retinas checked after the amount of eye-rolling dialogue they have to endure. In one particularly stiff exchange, Jack asks Joy why she is wearing a sports bra. “It’s comfortable and supportive, like what a man should be,” she replies, adding she is saving her more intimate clothes for her “non-retarded husband.” Such conversations are all too common in the movie and make one wonder what Diaz, Kutcher or any other person who read the screenplay could have possibly seen in the project.
Kutcher and the perpetually annoying Diaz bring absolutely no chemistry or charm to the film. The movie sadly reduces the wonderful Sudeikis to exclaiming phrases such as “Shitballs!” and getting punched in the crotch.
As the opening credits roll, the soon-to-be disgraced names are displayed with flickering neon lights, which ironically serve as a fair metaphor for what the audience is about to see – a shallow, sputtering version of an attraction that should be much more appealing. If the film does accomplish one thing, it is that it proves the old adage: What happens in Vegas should, in fact, stay in Vegas.
tfloyd1@umd.edu
Rating: O out of 4 Stars
