What Happens in Vegas (2008) Film Rating and Review :
Rating :
Acting – 2/10
Direction – 1.5/10
Screenplay – 1.5/10
Music – 1.5/10
Technique – 1/10
Review :
Nothing happens in Vegas
What Happens in Vegas, one of those junky time-wasters that routinely pop up in movie theatres, won’t make you laugh much or at all. (Once was enough for me.) But if you know anything about the art or have ever marvelled at how even the most generic of old B-movies look pretty good (they were usually in focus, for starters), you may wonder how a major studio like 20th Century Fox could release something this crudely manufactured, with its graceless setups, unstable lensing and ghastly lighting. It also makes you wonder if executives at studios look at dailies, much less can hear the poetry of the English language.
The word dailies here refers to select material shot that day and viewed by certain crew members. Dailies can be projected as prints or watched on videotape or both, but are now often digital and displayed on monitors, which may affect quality control. Because, unless you’re David Fincher and a genius, or an obsessive-compulsive, it may be easier to ignore your mistakes when they look like specks on a computer monitor. Or as Robert Elswit, the cinematographer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, which used traditional dailies, said on digitalproducer.com: “The other great thing about seeing film dailies is that you can’t kid yourself about focus and all the other technical issues that can come back to bite you.”
This digression may seem off the point of What Happens in Vegas, but because its director, Tom Vaughan, brings nothing of interest to the movie, including filmmaking, there isn’t anything to say other than to note its insulting ugliness and ineptitude. The badly matched Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher mug wildly, waving their limbs like upturned beetles. Ms Diaz is particularly ill-served by the material and the production; she’s harshly, at times brutally, lighted and often unflatteringly costumed. It’s disheartening that Ms Diaz doesn’t seem to realise that there’s no upside to a role that strips away her dignity even as it peels off her clothes, especially when she’s playing the shrew. It’s no wonder Mr Kutcher looks so relaxed.
Though it’s more sitcom than romcom, What Happens in Vegas recycles a plot — a separated couple reunite — that will be familiar to anyone who’s had the pleasure of watching films like The Awful Truth and It Happened One Night. The philosopher Stanley Cavell anointed this subgenre of 1930s and 1940s delights comedies of remarriage, stories driven by the effort to get the couple back together and involving what he terms overcoming skepticism. The couple aren’t sure if reuniting is a good idea but do so anyway, as when Rosalind Russell warily eyeballs Cary Grant at the end of His Girl Friday and says, right after he plants a wet one: “I’m just a fool. That’s what I am. I know what it’s going to be like.” She knows, and we do too, having been given a glimpse of that happily ever after in the rat-a-tat of the couple’s wisecracking romancing.
There are no wisecracks in Dana Fox’s screenplay for What Happens in Vegas, just insults, yucky yucks (“I threw up in my purse”) and exposition. The couple, strangers who marry during a Vegas drunk and stay together to hold on to a fat casino payout, enter without a shared history or much personality. They learn to live as a couple through mutual abuse and pranks: he removes the toilet seat, and she solicits some “sluts” to tempt him into contract-breaking infidelity.
The cynicism about human beings (us included) reeks as much as the filmmaking.
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