Couples Retreat, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

Where do we start? This has to be the most inept piece of laughter-engineering I have yet seen emerge from the self-congratulatory world of Vince Vaughn and pals. I’m pretty sure that had I submitted the script for this mirthless dead zone, it would have been rejected for all the reasons I am about to elaborate. But Mr Vaughn is a prime example of someone who having got the door to Hollywood success open, is determined to make the most of his time in the celebro-sphere.

OK, enough of the invective — let’s get specific. It’s a given of storytelling that the path taken by your protagonist has to be one where the audience can believe in the forces that compel the hero to act as he does. You want to see people make choices that make sense, even if they’re not the ones you’d make yourself. And this takes some thought about the emotions at play within the world of the story. Here, Couples Retreat falls at the first hurdle.

The couples in question have to be motivated to get to an island retreat where they will experience compulsory relationship counselling. Now, no sane couple I’m aware of would submit to such an ordeal, and the audience will be with me on this one. So what artillery is brought in to ensure that the holidayers go to the island? First, the dullard organising the experience has suffered testicular cancer, which means that having gone through pain once his friends are presumably willing to do so again. Second, most egregiously, Vince Vaughn’s winsome children say that they want mummy and daddy to go on the retreat so they don’t divorce. And you can’t ignore the counsel of winsome children.

Ick. So, the characters have been crowbarred onto the island. Now we have to find a sane reason for them to remain there, when just across the bay is an island of singles partying their asses off. You know and I know that at least some of the couples are going to head over to that island at some point in the story. But only when it makes dramatic sense. And there is little of that in evidence anywhere in this manipulative piece of drek. Instead, the characters are told that they will forfeit their right to be on the island unless they go through the revolutionary (read: sappy) couples counselling process devised by the mysterious French therapist who is Stalin to this tropical gulag.

Are you sensing my hostility? Good. This really is one of the most dismal films I’ve seen in a long time, an utterly contrived and mechanical exercise in delivering half-laughs to the witless. Naturally, the couples have to come off the island better than they went on it, and it’s not because of the entreaties of Frenchie and his staff. Instead it’s down to downhome American cussedness: the couples go to the party island, and — you guessed! — realise that their relationships matter to them more than casual temptations of the flesh. Just to make sure the audience have family values wired in too, acres of pliant flesh are put on display for them to say no to.

There is little else to say. Couples Retreat is a sorry excuse for a comedy, wasting some genuine performing talent in the pursuit of cheap overchoreographed gags that seem to have come off a production line. I’m guessing that factory was until recently devoted to making cars, and the workers are making valiant but so far amateurish attempts to shift over to the creation of humour. As a case study in how not to write a film, Couples Retreat has a lot to offer. Otherwise, avoid at all costs.