Cast away for the pay

Couples Retreat
DIRECTED BY: Peter Billingsley
STARRING: Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau, Malin
Ackerman, Jason Bateman
CERT: 15A

YOU can hardly begrudge gifted individuals an off day. Or a day when they might feel like just putting the old brain on the back-burner and going through the motions for a pay cheque. Fire away. Knock yourself out. I just don’t want to have to see it.
And yet here we are. Couples Retreat is written by and stars Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau, two very funny men with a proven record in the fields of both rib-tickling and side-splitting.
It also stars the excellent Jason Bateman, and several other very talented people. But it is rubbish, merely another example of the kind of lazy, juvenile nonsense that passes for comedy now – made all the worse because most such movies do not have this kind of talent on board.
When infertile married couple Jason and Cynthia (Bateman and Kristen Bell) manage to persuade six of their friends to join them on a healing couples retreat on an exotic island – mostly on account of the excellent group rate – all concerned imagine lazy cocktail days by the beach and good times all round.
What the couples – Dave and Ronnie (Vaughn and Ackerman), Joey and Lucy (Favreau and Kristin Davis) and Shane and Trudy (Faizon Love and Kali Hawk) find instead is a strict therapy regime aimed at ironing out all of their issues and teaching them valuable lessons about themselves. In other words, Temptation Island, as dreamed up by Judd Apatow.
Except the Eden resort is run by Monsieur Marcel (Jean Reno) and managed by his right hand man Cstanley “That’s Stanley with a C” (Peter Serafanovicz) – whose main task appears to be to keep their captive couples from all temptation.
Or at least from the kind on offer on the other side of the island, where the singles are living it up in East Eden.
That Couples Retreat raises the occasional decent laugh has more to do with the law of averages than it does with any kind of inspired writing from Vaughn and Favreau, who seem happy to keep the bar low when they could have made a good stab at something more sharp and substantial.
Certainly the few highlights here have little to do with the input of director Peter Billingsley, who surely deserves some kind of special achievement award for managing to make the lovely Bora Bora look bland.
The cast can’t do much to save it, though they’re all in likeable form, and Favreau in particular stands out in a handful of scenes that show what Couples Retreat might have been. Alas.

The Imaginarium Of Doctor
Parnassus
DIRECTED BY: Terry Gilliam
STARRING: Christopher Plummer, Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Tom Waits
CERT: 12A

It’s a long while now since the great Terry Gilliam made a great film – Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas in 1998 being the last, ending a fine run in the 90s that included The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys and Monty Python’s Holy Grail.
The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus doesn’t do much to put things right, but the Heath Ledger factor – or morbid curiosity if you like – will ensure a bigger audience and considerably more success than the film might otherwise have enjoyed.
Ledger died while shooting the film, and Gilliam ultimately employed Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell to expand Ledger’s role in what turns out to be an admirable feat of his wild imagination. But anyone hoping for a special or particularly powerful final performance will be disappointed, especially after something as unique and memorable as the Joker.
The film itself is a bit of a mess – Gilliam indulging in all of his worst excesses, blowing you away one minute with the most spectacular imagery, then wrecking your head the next with his mind-bending plot and his infuriating habit of whipping up extravagant chaos for the sake of it.
Dr Parnassus (Plummer) owns an old fashioned travelling show, where customers in modern-day London are enticed to step through a magical mirror to a world of the imagination – where pleasure and happiness lie in wait for some and not so jolly times lurk for others.
Parnassus himself is a tad out of the ordinary, an ancient man who made a pact wih the devil a thousand years ago – exchanging immortality for the soul of his firstborn, the debt to be collected on the child’s 16th birthday. Now the doctor’s daughter Valentina (Lily Cole) is almost of age and so he strikes another deal with Mr Nick (Tom Waits), whereby the girl will be saved if Parnassus can deliver five souls to the great netherworld beyond the mirror.
Into this mess comes Tony (Ledger), who is found hanging from a bridge before being rescued and taken in by Parnassus and his troupe.
This little gang also includes the incurably amorous Anton (Andrew Garfield) and the obligatory midget, Percy (Verne Troyer – our old friend Mini Me).
Depp, Law and an impressive Colin Farrell act as surrogates of Tony when he goes through the looking glass – and as a device born out of tragic necessity it works very well.
But as a whole the film is just too erratic and disjointed, like a Monty Python show crossed with a hyperactive child’s hallucination. But without the laughs.