Fridae

Hollywood hasn’t made too many decent romantic comedy in decades, aside from The Holiday, which was very good. You can blame it on a drought of romcom talent on all fronts – there aren’t enough directors, screenwriters, or actors who can pull this genre off. For a very predictable, formulaic genre, that this could happen is horrifying. It gets very exhausting to watch a romantic comedy that feels like a series of rough sketches stapled together by a writing team or a studio committee – which is precisely how very bad scripts are actually produced nowadays.

Now, that’s also the reason for the rise of the alternative romcom wave of the last decade, mostly starring Adam Sandler as a passive-aggressive man-child with anger issues – but there’s so far as one can go with that single idea.

Vince Vaughn, having graduated from frat boy movies (Old School et al), has been trying to make several romantic comedies in the recent years. While The Break-up was an unqualified disaster and Four Christmasses was almost passable, we believe that Vaughn might be on the verge of writing, producing, or starring in very good romcoms in the near future, based on his showing with Couples Retreat.

What works well here is a strong, coherent theme: four couples exile themselves to a Club Med-style resort for couples who need relationship therapy. The premise itself imposes a discipline that romcom writing teams really need, and the result is a more or less coherent movie that, even with its obvious series of sketches that build up to comic set pieces, is tightly written, and the breezy plot moves from joke to joke, without much misfiring.

The creative team behind Couples Retreat are aware of the very formulaic trappings of what they’ve written. Their inspired casting of Jean Reno as the spiritual guru and chief relationship mentor of the resort provides an opportunity for the team to play up the cheesiness and formula of a romcom set on a couples resort.