Couples Retreat
(Peter Billingsley) Vince Vaughn, Makin Akerman, Jason Bateman, Faizon Love, Jon Favreau, Kristin Davis, Kristen Bell
Running time: 107 minutes (15A)
Rating: 1/5

FACED with the choice of having to sit through this comedy one more time, or having to cage-fight a sleep-deprived, salmon-starved grizzly bear on steroids, I have no doubt which it would be. Bring it on, Yogi.

Even the fast-talking, usually irrepressible Vince Vaughn seems subdued. Perhaps during filming he awoke to the fact he can't write. And neither can co-star Jon Favreau, the pair having penned the screenplay with Dana Fox.

The creaking plot, about four couples who go to a paradise island where three of their unsatisfactory marriages are put to the test, is oiled by various masturbation jokes. The token overweight African-American among them (Faizon Love) goes there with a 20-year-old girlfriend as he has been shown to be incapable of keeping his marriage together, and is generally used as a foil for whitey's laughs.

Around 90 minutes in, the film manages to find time to write into the plot a five-minute product placement for a computer game.

This paradise island is hell on earth.