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Movie review: 'What Happens in Vegas'

This dud’s for you

By Michael Phillips

Tribune critic
May 8, 2008

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1 1/2 stars (out of four)

Thanks to the aggressive product placement of “What Happens in Vegas,” I’ll always associate Budweiser with a distinct lack of laughter. I’m sure that’s not what Anheuser-Busch had in mind!

 The year’s latest attempt at romantic comedy film stars Cameron Diaz as a  strait-laced, Type-A commodities trader who cuts loose in Vegas after being dumped by her pill of a boyfriend. There she bumps into irresponsible, irrepressible Jack, played by Ashton Kutcher. They drink, they marry, they win $3 mil at the slots, they wake up with hangovers, they bicker and regret and rue the day. Then they return to New York and their respective hollow lives. Before granting their annulment, a fancifully creative judge (Dennis Miller) orders these Bickersons to live together for six months, or else no money. The screenplay by Dana Fox (she was one of the rewriters of “27 Dresses”) devolves into a series of humiliating pranks that always give the upper narrative hand to the male lead. Talk about depressing. I mean, that’s what male screenwriters are for—to unfairly stack the deck against the female leads.

 Joy and Jack cohabitate uneasily, whine to their respective best pals, drive each other nuts and eventually acknowledge that what they have is real. So they end up with love and money. All this is in the trailer. The film, directed by Tom Vaughan, works up so little rooting interest in the outcome, you may find yourself taking an active rooting disinterest instead.

 So many things, small and large, erode any sense of fun here. The movie looks like crud—like it, too, stayed up and drank all night. Cinematographer Matthew F. Leonetti can’t light a simple apartment interior without making it look like the worst of ’70s television. Kutcher and Diaz put the manufactured charm in overdrive every second, but neither can redeem the material. Only Lake Bell, as Diaz’s wiseacre friend, does something for “What Happens in Vegas,” and coming off “Over Her Dead Body,” another recent rom-com for the scrap heap, Bell must be wondering what a dame’s gotta do to get herself a film that knows what it’s doing.

mjphillips@tribune.com

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