In Twenty 20-Fav, we’re spending 2025 examining the work of actor/director Jon Favreau. This week, we take another trip to Vaughn country.
Watching this week’s entry felt like returning to the scene of a crime. In 2009, I had just started a gig writing stupid movie reviews for Something Awful, and was awarded the task of watching and reviewing Couples Retreat. My beat hadn’t yet been defined as “taking farting dog movies seriously”, but Couples Retreat marked a real turning point for me as a critic and writer. At the time I found this movie so bereft of comedy, or even common sense, that I resorted to writing science fiction just to get myself through the assignment.
Couples Retreat isn’t necessarily a bad movie. It’s just that it’s barely even a movie in the first place. This is the definition of a working vacation, the kind of film Adam Sandler would soon build an entire cottage industry around. A bunch of famous actors jetting off to a tropical oasis on a Hollywood studio’s dime, where everyone’s basically playing themselves, returning with a feature film in hand that could only be considered a movie in the most academic of senses. That’s not to say you can’t make a good movie under those circumstances. But in this instance? No, they absolutely did not.
As the film opens, we spend about thirty minutes getting to know the four couples who are gonna lead us through this tropical quagmire of bad relationship advice: Couple A is Dave and Ronnie (Vince Vaughn/Malin Akerman), a perfectly happy couple whose only real sin is that they both work too much. Couple B is Joey and Lucy (Jon Favreau/Kristin Davis), high school sweethearts who are now pretty damn sick of each other but refuse to acknowledge it. Couple C is Shane and Trudy (Faizon Love/Kali Hawk), a divorced dude and his new girlfriend half his age. Finally, couple D is Jason and Cynthia (Jason Bateman/Kristen Bell), who are both tightly-wound time-bombs considering a divorce. In an attempt to save their marriage, they rope all their friends into an all-inclusive tropical getaway to Eden, an island resort where they soon find that they’ve all been duped into two weeks of intense couples therapy. Ha ha ha!
Right away, our coterie of cranky couples meets Stanley (Peter Serafinowicz), who claims his name is spelled with a C1. This is the manager of the resort, who informs everyone that they must attend every team-building session and every therapy meeting or else they will fail the program. (And also apparently get their money back? For this all-inclusive vacation? I’m no lawyer, but I think I know a loophole when I hear one.) Anyway, they’re also met by relationship guru Marcel (Jean Reno, clearly enjoying not having to play a tough guy for once) who makes them participate in the kind of team-building exercises that are clearly meant to raise everyone’s blood pressure on purpose. Yeah, sure, go take this bucket of chum and swim out to where the sharks are. This is to help teach you to stay calm, and not because we secretly want to kill our paying guests. Also, stress management isn’t exactly a problem with any of these characters, so I think Vince Vaughn just wanted to go snorkeling one day and said “hey, bring the camera!”
Jean Reno’s team-building exercises amount to little more than getting everyone in bathing suits, and the movie’s pretty nakedly transparent about this. Let’s get the ladies in skimpy bikinis, that’s what we’re paying for, right? And just so nobody can accuse the movie of being too ‘male gazey’, they also treat us to Faizon Love’s bare butt. Ha ha ha!
This is like the fifth or sixth movie in this series where the primary running theme is that guys have a hard time expressing their emotions. It was charming back in Swingers and Made, where the whole point was that young dudes are forced to grow up and be honest with themselves. But now these guys are comfortably in their forties, and they’re still acting like children who can barely suppress their most feral instincts. It’s not funny anymore, guys. I’m starting to think you didn’t actually learn anything about yourselves and that the lessons learned in Swingers were all for show. I can appreciate this group of guys just wanting to hang out and be bros on a studio’s dime, but don’t make me watch it.
After a few more team-building exercises and therapy sessions (courtesy of counselors John Michael Higgins and Ken Jeong), everyone naturally gets fed up with each other. Tensions come to a head and all of our couples go their separate ways. The ladies decide they wanna go party on the other side of the island with all the sexy young singles, which the movie constantly reminds us is basically a never-ending orgy. The guys, realizing that they’ve fucked up and are in danger of losing their women forever, go off in search of their wives, instead finding themselves in the employee lounge. Sctanley agrees to point them to Sex-Haver’s Cove if Dave can best him in a round of Guitar Hero.
So now let’s talk about Guitar Hero. 2009 was right around the time that series of games reached its peak popularity. Guitar Hero, along with its rival series Rock Band, flooded the market with guitar-shaped controllers exclusively for these games, and by the time Couples Retreat came out, this crap was everywhere. Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau were both huge fans of the series, so they intentionally wrote a scene into the movie where Vaughn gets to play the game and pretend to be super cool doing it.
But we need some way to explain why Vince Vaughn, a married man pushing 40, is so good at Guitar Hero. Do we write his character as a perpetual manchild who can’t stop playing video games? No, that would just make him seem pathetic. Should we write it into the script that he loves playing Guitar Hero with his kids? No, that wouldn’t work either; it would make him seem like too good a father to have marital problems. What if we said his character was a Guitar Hero salesman? Yeah, yeah! He sells Guitar Hero! He has to be good at it in order to sell it!
They don’t say he works for Activision, or even RedOctane, the studio that actually makes the game. We don’t ever even see him at work in any capacity other than randomly shouting into his cell phone in public. Vince Vaughn’s job is just “Guitar Hero salesman”. As someone who actually did sell Guitar Hero units around the time this movie came out2, this feels like a slight against me, personally.
But contrast this with the previous entry in this series, I Love You, Man, where Paul Rudd and Jason Segel spend a significant portion of the film actually playing music together. That’s real talent. It’s genuinely impressive seeing the two jam out to Rush’s “Tom Sawyer”, even if they’re intentionally doing the worst Geddy Lee impression humanly possible. Smash cut to Vince Vaughn and Peter Serafinowicz trying to rock out with half-sized plastic guitars while Billy Squier’s “Lonely is the Night” blasts through the speakers. It’s framed as a joke, sure, but a) it’s not funny, and b) just seems kind of pathetic. This guy deserves to win his wife back just because he can win a video game? Get the fuck outta here.
I realize now, sixteen years later, that I’m still chasing tangents in order to talk about this movie. There’s just nothing worth talking about here. Couples Retreat made a decent return on its investment, but considering all the promotional tie-ins associated with the film, it was probably a ridiculous success. It’s also not one I ever hear anyone talk about, especially not among the likes of Vaughn’s other comedies. It’s not funny, but it’s also not offensively bad in any way that’s even interesting. It simply exists. It exists as a document of a time when all these guys wanted to take their friends on a tropical vacation. And then they brought the slideshow home and made us all pay to watch it. You bastards.
THE FAVREAU DIMENSION
This one comes, once again, from the yuk factory that is Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Picture Show. Co-written by Vaughn, Favreau and Dana Fox, Couples Retreat also has the distinction of being the directing debut of Vaughn’s longtime co-conspirator Peter Billingsley. So this isn’t some studio comedy where the gears were gonna turn whether these guys jumped on board or not. This was 100% something our boys committed to on purpose.
For his part, Favs is really leaning hard on the angry douche role he’s cultivated in I Love You, Man, but at least here he’s got Vince Vaughn to balance him out. Speaking of Vaughn, this isn’t the last time we’ll see him in this column, but it does sort of mark the end of an era. From here on in, Jon Favreau’s gonna be in the blockbuster business. Starting with Iron Man 2.
FINAL RATING
2 stars (out of 5). S’pretty bad.
NEXT TIME: I just said it. It’s Iron Man 2.
- The credits inform us that it’s spelled ‘Sctanley’. Okay, sure.
↩︎ - True story: I worked at a GameStop in the late-aughts and my manager recommended me for a promotion based on my ability to sell people on Guitar Hero. In reality, I was just good at explaining to skeptical moms that it wasn’t a complete waste of time. ↩︎
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