What Happens in Vegas (*1/2)

This “romantic” comedy has four segments. In the first, the guy (Ashton Kutcher) is fired by his own dad, and his bride-to-be gets dumped by her fiancé as a bunch of hidden surprise-party guests listen in. I liked that part best, not just because the surprise-party gag was amusing, but because I had not yet begun to hate these people. That would seem to be the object of the second part of the movie, a screamingly absurd sequence of events that begins with the parties getting accidentally assigned to the same hotel room—cue the screams—and ends with them forced, in the aftermath of a drinking-binge wedding that same night, to cohabit in the groom’s scuzzy one-bedroom apartment in New York. The third and longest segment reinforced my dislike of the two characters as they feud for reasons inadequately explained by the trumped-up plot. The puckering Diaz and the smirking Kutcher carefully overplay each line. And then, in the fourth segment—guess what—they are suddenly supposedly to like each other, and we are supposed to like them. This kind of love-hate comedy can sometimes work, but even if Diaz and Kutcher were Tracy and Hepburn—they’re not—they couldn’t have overcome a script devoid of logic or wit. Without wit, this feuding couple become merely an obnoxious, unfunny pair of actors.

IMDB link

viewed 5/10/08 at Moorestown; reviewed 5/11/08