Men are
from Mars, women are from Venus, and the insipid romantic comedy What
Happens In Vegas
takes all the attendant clichés as a given. Ashton Kutcher plays a typical
dude: A lazy, overgrown adolescent who always leaves the toilet seat up, can't
commit to a relationship, and seems generally content to get sloshed and wallow
in his own filth. And in the overlong beer commercial that is their on-screen
relationship, Cameron Diaz plays his exact opposite: A motivated,
career-oriented neat freak who's ready for marriage and children, and
invariably the biggest buzzkill in the room. No one could argue that this
low-wattage pair belongs together—or, more to the point, deserves each
other—but the gimmicky contrivances necessary to make it happen are
ludicrous even by rom-com standards.
The plot is
one that makes you feel dumber for having repeated it: Kutcher gets fired from
a cushy job in his dad's furniture business. Diaz's commitment-phobic boyfriend
dumps her the night she hosts his surprise birthday party. Both are New Yorkers
and both decide to head off to Vegas with their best friends (Rob Corddry with
Kutcher, Lake Bell with Diaz), where they hook up for a wild night and wind up
getting married. An annulment should be easy enough to attain the next morning,
except that Kutcher wins a $3 million jackpot on Diaz's quarter, so they have
to go to court to decide who gets the money. But wait! The judge (Dennis
Miller) freezes the cash and sentences them to "six years of hard marriage" in
the hopes that they'll take their sham marriage more seriously. So Diaz moves
in with Kutcher, and the games begin.
What
Happens In Vegas
expends a lot of energy on the pair's individual attempts to sabotage the deal
and run off with the money, each of which makes them seem that much more petty
and unlikable. On the sidelines, Corddry and Bell have the exact same love/hate
dynamic, and they're considerably more relaxed and funny as sparring partners,
mainly because they're not roasting in high-concept hell. As for Kutcher, is
there any actor out there who expends so little effort to get into character?
That doesn't mean his performances are effortless—quite the contrary, he
goes overboard trying to ingratiate himself to the audience—but rather
they whiff of smug self-satisfaction. Complain all you want about the affable
slobs in Judd Apatow comedies; at least they're not tools.