Friday, January 14, 2011 at 7:19PM Movie Review - 'The Dilemma'
| The Dilemma
Starring Vince Vaughn and Kevin James
|
Ah, The Dilemma… Finally, Ron Howard brings us a film named expressly for the experience that the audience has viewing it. Thank goodness for the decision to do this rather than describing the crew’s feelings while making it, or we may have ended up with a film called Why Are We Doing This? or Is Vince Vaughn Really Still Talking? God forbid. Then we might have saved the cost of admission and treated ourselves to a Star Magazine and a Big Mac. Undoubtedly a better way to spend an hour and fifty minutes.
Yes, I said one hour and fifty minutes. Writer Allan Loeb took a brave step into the unknown with this film, throwing to the wind all sense of formulaic comedic construction, and instead ventured into the land of rambling scenes, a loosely constructed story, minimally developed and some completely superfluous characters, anti-gay references, and non-sensical drama. Hip hip hooray!
The Dilemma follows Ronny Valentine (Vince Vaughn) on a ridiculous adventure to expose the infidelity of his best friend’s wife, played by Winona Ryder. Mean while, the best friend and business partner, Nick Brannen (Kevin James) is unwittingly working his butt off to perfect an interchangeable electric car motor that the two have sold to Chrysler. This aspect of the film bordered on interesting, but the sheer length and repetitive quality of nearly every single scene killed the comedy, the intrigue, and therefore, the attention span of the audience.
Another subplot that may have pulled a few heartstrings was the relationship between Valentine and girlfriend Beth, played by Jennifer Connelly. After pulling through Valentine’s gambling addiction together, he is contemplating popping the question, but is simultaneously sabotaging his chances with her with his growing obsession with his best friend’s marital struggles. Unfortunately, Connelly and Vaughn only obtained a smidgen of chemistry, and Connelly’s character was too underdeveloped to really care about.
This is not to say that the performances were necessarily bad. Even Channing Tatum was decent, and at times, quite funny. All of them would have been fine in a comedy of appropriate length that adhered to some sort of rules regarding the telling of a story.
Kevin James was charming as can be, truly lovable, and graced the film with his brilliant comedic timing as he always does. However, these devices fall completely flat if the film has no timing of its own. Vaughn also does what he does best in this film, the foot-in-the-mouth style ramblings into hilarity that gets him paid the big bucks. But, you’d think that a man with Howard’s experience would know when to yell, “Cut!” Come on! Save the guy a bit of dignity and get us to the next scene, please!
In addition to plain bad story telling, it is always a travesty when good talent is wasted. Queen Latifah plays Susan Warner, a supervisor hired by Chrysler to watch over Valentine and Brannen’s engine project. Complete with enthusiasm, great energy, and obscene catch phrases, Warner was shaping up to be an interesting character and a nice break from the cheating melodrama. The problem is, her character serves absolutely no purpose in the film what so ever, except to talk about “lady wood”. Great. I hope that phrase catches on somewhere or Universal just wasted a whole lot of money.
Sorry guys, this is not the movie you need to see at the theaters this week, unless you’ve had a very difficult time sleeping lately.
Reader Comments (2)
Ugh who wants to waste an afternoon watching 2 overweight unattractive middleaged white dudes as movie leads make asses of themselves? Hell no!
I had the pleasure of seeing this back in October at a test screening in Jersey. I remember enjoying it quite a lot. It probably could've been due to the nostalgia of seeing a movie before hand and for FREE. I just remember Channing Tatum being the funniest character in the movie.