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Movie review: “What Happens in Vegas”
BY MAGGIE SCOTT
Let’s just say, it’s a sure bet that “What Happens in Vegas” is not getting a stamp of approval from the Las Vegas Visitors and Convention Bureau. Even though the city seems fine with advertising itself as the destination of choice for people looking for opportunities to corrupt themselves, this comedy/romance from director Tom Vaughan will make the town’s marketers cringe.
Drunk and debauched freaks? No problem…as long as it looks like fun. But, knuckleheaded dopes whose shenanigans make you want to yawn? Big mistake.
When it comes to yelling it out on the trading floor, Joy McNally (Cameron Diaz) can say her personality is the perfect fit. But, for her boyfriend, it’s “exhausting.” On the doorstep of his apartment, where friends and family are hiding, ready to jump up and yell “surprise!” to the birthday boy, Mason (Jason Sudeikis) tells Joy, “I don’t want to marry you.”
What’s a decent, sweet, heart-broken girl to do? Duh…fly to Vegas with your best friend and spend a few days in “the one place where you can act like an idiot!”
For Jack Fuller (Ashton Kutcher), Vegas is the “one place where you can step up and be a man!” Jack’s dad (Treat Williams) has given him the heave-ho from the family business (“you’ve had a hundred second chances”); and a savvy young lady tells Jack he’s “not exactly marriage material.”
Where to take stock and plan your next move? Duh…the desert playground, where Jack and his best bud, “Hater” (Rob Corddry), check into their hotel room, only to confront the partially clothed Joy and her friend Tipper (Lake Bell), who react to the reservation desk’s mistake by clobbering the “perverts.”
From this friendly introduction, the quartet let themselves loose on the city, where its magic and endless shots of inhibition-pulverizing hooch result in two more judgment-impaired strangers getting hitched.
Mercifully, the wedding chapel debacle is saved for the movie’s closing credits; but painfully, the viewer is not spared what happens after Joy wakes up with a hangover and a cute little note to the “wifey” from Jack. With the shortest honeymoon in history, Joy and Jack are trading insults over the buffet: “Robot!” “Loser!”
Annulment should be easy, right? Wrong. The little complicating factor of $3 million dollars, won with Joy’s quarter and Jack’s pull of the lever, sends them back to New York and to a judge’s chambers, where the Honorable Whopper (Dennis Miller) sentences them to “six months of hard marriage.”
How something resembling love germinates in such rocky soil is often embarrassing to watch, as the typically sassy Diaz acts like an overwrought banshee and the typically terminally cute Kutcher acts like his personality got an overdose of botox.
Queen Latifah gamely makes the most of her role as Dr. Twitchell, a marriage counselor with a finely tuned crap detector. Fold on this one, if you don’t want to see Diaz photographed so she looks like a piece of spoiled liver; and bet on a winner by watching Kutcher in one of the best comedies about battling newlyweds, Just Married.
What Happens in Vegas is a 20th Century Fox release, rated PG-13 for sexual and crude content, language and drug reference.
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