Couples Retreat

A bit of rough: Kristin Davis warms to her yoga instructor, Salvadore (Carlos Ponce)

Directed by Peter Billingsley. Starring Vince Vaughan, Jason Bateman, Jon Favereau, Malin Akerman, Kristin Davis, Kristin Bell, Faizon Love, Jean Reno. 15A cert, gen release, 107 min.

THIS USELESS comedy features a couple who, torn apart by a child’s absence, retire to a retreat named Eden for rehabilitation.

Sound familiar? Yes, it's the plot of Lars von Trier's existential horror film Antichrist. That entertainment, as you will recall, featured genital mutilation, penises ejaculating blood and the hammering of a bolt through a blameless fibula. Yet, when set beside Peter Billingsley's breathtakingly wretched comedy, Antichristnow seems like a clutch of posies resting upon a big bowl of lovely trifle. Couples Retreatis that bad, you see.

There’s really no need for the film to be quite so wretched because the scenario would do well enough for a lowbrow, off-peak comedy. Four couples, none of whom are getting on that happily together, head off to a resort, whose resident guru (a somnambulant Jean Reno) promises to heel all romantic rifts and point his clients towards marital bliss.

Dragged up at six in the morning for therapy sessions before being forced to swim with hungry sharks, the chaps begin to look longingly toward a nearby singles resort where pretty idiots drink from plastic pineapples all day long. Noting that the cast includes such respectable figures as Jason Bateman and Vince Vaughn, you could be forgiven for anticipating one or two reasonably hearty yucks.

Forget about it. For a start, the film-makers are far too interested in teaching us lessons about why people drift apart and how they might get back together. As a result, time that could have been spent pushing the heroes into tide pools or having them walk into palm trees is taken up with long, tedious conversations with nodding analysts. Any vaguely risque material has been filleted out to permit a kinder certificate. The characters, insofar as they meet that description, are as uniformly charmless as they are repellently self-absorbed.

Now, here’s a bunch of people who deserve bolts rammed through their calves and scissors directed at unmentionable cavities. There’s never a von Trier around when you need one.