Saint John of Las Vegas (**1/2)

This is the second-funniest movie of the last year to be set in Vegas, though it’s a toss up whether this or The Hangover’s plot is less believable. The Hangover, you may recall, involved a foursome who wake up to find their hotel room mysteriously trashed, a tiger in the bathroom, an unclaimed baby, and a chicken. Here we have naturists with guns, a burning tow-truck driver (in a flame-retardant suit), and the most unusual lap dance I’ve seen on film. I imagined that the chicken from The Hangover, whose presence never was explained, might show up.

It’s supposed to be based on Dante’s Inferno, in presumably its least-literal film interpretation. John (Steve Buscemi) shares Dante’s last name, Alegheri, and his journey into the here-figurative Hell is guided by one Virgil (Romany Malco)—his surly coworker, not the poet. They’re insurance investigators in Albuquerque. John’s a gambling addict who moved out of Nevada so his losses would be confined to scratch-off tickets and such, but has to go back there to uncover a possibly fraudulent claim. This is a decent premise for a movie, but writer-director Hue Rhodes, in a feature debut, is more interested in having a bunch of weird stuff happen than in showing the dark side of gambling addiction or how insurance companies really do catch cheaters. (Presumably it doesn't involve sending investigators from 500 miles away, but who knows.) The sharpest moment is when John, finally headed back into a casino, gets a call from his erstwhile sweetheart (Sarah Silverman) and quickly brushes her off.

For all the (easily ignored) 14th-century literary references, the comedy plays like a small picture whose amusing moments don’t quite cohere (or seem forced), and whose plot doesn’t really work. Dream sequences seem like padding in a film that still winds up short of the 90-minute mark.

IMDB link

viewed 2/8/2010 at Ritz Bourse [PFS screening] and reviewed 2/9–11/2010

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