By Drew Turney

After Judd Apatow’s ‘geek clique’, the comedy club of Vince Vaughan, Owen Wilson, Ben Stiller, Jon Favreau and their various hangers-on is one of the most enduring (and bankable).

It’s turned out some pretty funny movies (”The Wedding Crashers”) as well as some admittedly less than funny movies (”You, Me and Dupree”), but few sink to the depths of this turgid new offering.

The premise isn’t the problem. While not a grand universal theme addressing the fears and hopes of humanity, a group of married friends at an idyllic island resort for intensive couples counseling and therapy has real comic possibilities.

Some of them are mined appropriately, but never with much conviction. Ironically the comedy of ”Couples Retreat” is a lot like the approach of the stuck up Jason (Bateman), who likes to explain things to his friends with comprehensive Powerpoint presentations. Like Jason’s tiresome and over-wrought lectures, it only makes sense on paper.

You get the feeling Vaughan and Favreau wanted an excuse to hang around a holiday resort with a bunch of pals for a few weeks of partying and they thought shooting a movie there was a good way to write the expense off on their taxes.

Jason and Cynthia (Bateman and Kristen Bell) are considering a divorce and rope their six unsuspecting friends into a package deal at Eden resort, a paradise that promises marital bliss. What the brochure doesn’t say is that marital bliss is achieved by 6am couples counseling, a yoga instructor who’s a little too friendly with the wives and regular lectures in mysticism by the enigmatic owner Marcel (Reno).

Director Peter Billingsley’s a bit too much like Shawn (”Night at The Museum”) Levy, a studio fixture whose only job is to set up cameras to capture very standard fare and move product. The direction is as flat as the script, the liberal use of digital effects and colour grading wielded as if by a ten year old playing with Maya for the first time.

Vaughan, Favreau and co-stars Faizon Love, Bateman, Malin Ackerman, Kristin (”Sex and the City”) Davis and Kristen (”Forgetting Sarah Marshall”) Bell all appear to be having a good time but neither the script nor any idiosyncrasies in the roles call for anything more than mugging. As they frequently do, Jean Reno and Temuera Morrison embarrass themselves shamelessly in such piffle and should both fire their agents.

There are a few funny lines, but they peter out towards the middle as the movie gets eye-rollingly mushy when the script just doesn’t justify it. By the time it starts you still won’t really care about these people, you’ll just want them to crack jokes.

But perhaps the worst aspect of the movie is the most shameless product placement you’ll have seen in a long time, a five-minute sequence centered around the Activision game Guitar Hero. Not just the existence but the tone of the scene (played as if in a western saloon) is so out of place and irrelevant to the plot it’s as if the movie breaks for a commercial.

At least the now-ubiquitous Apple laptops in movies are props and you can tune them out. Some production executive needs to be fired for the idea, and while they’re at it a few agents and creative people should have their pay docked as atonement for this shambolic, unfunny drivel.

Extras

Not that I’d really want to put you through any of it, but you’ll find an audio commentary, a gag reel, a featurette on how ‘lovely’ it was to film in Bora Bora, and some of the other stuff.