Shawn's What Happens in Vegas Review

2008 Movie #86 - What Happens in Vegas

This movie opened against Speed Racer and I remember hoping to god that Speed financially kicked the shit out of this one. Sadly that wasn’t the case. In the end Speed Racer made around 43 million (as of writing this anyway). What Happens in Vegas on the other end, has made a disgusting and grossly undeserved 80 million. When you factor in the undeniable DVD rental and sales money, this thing is going to make more than 100 million dollars, which is about 99,999,999 more dollars than the thing deserves. I even hope the dollar it made in that scenario was somehow a mistake.

This movie is like my also recently watched movie Smart People in that it follows people you don’t care about. Vegas takes things up a notch though. It doesn’t seem satisfied with simply not caring about these people, it wants to make sure that you downright loathe them. Believe me it does a damn good job of accomplishing this task too. The first hour of this movie is basically a chore to sit through. You know what though, some chores aren’t even that bad. The first of this movie is more like having your face eaten by an alligator. I may not know firsthand but if you were to show this movie to someone whose face has indeed been eaten by an alligator, they will start to have Vietman like flashbacks to the event while this movie is playing.

The first hour of this movie is nothing more than a group of people you hate yelling at each other. I don’t want to be around this kind of shit in real life, why would I want to spend time with these people in a movie, something that is supposed to take me out of reality?

Maybe if they were yelling something funny at each other it would be a little more tolerable, but no luck there either. The movie seems to think it’s some cutting edge, risqué, battle of the sexes movie when really, it does nothing new, uses jokes you’ve heard 1000 times before, and goes every path you would expect it to go. You keep waiting for some variation of the line “You don’t need Mr. Right, just Mr. Right Now.” Any movie containing that line deserves to burn. It’s the ultimate sign of lazy romantic comedy writing. I don’t remember if that line actually shows up in this movie but its awful enough without it.

So after you sit through that horrible first hour, with these horrible people yelling god awful one-liners at each other, the movie somehow concludes that you want things to work out for these people. Movie, that is the last thing on earth that I want. Not for one second did I buy these two would all of a sudden fall for each other. It happens so quick you have to wonder if maybe something was cut.

I know a lot of people enjoyed this movie but if anyone who did is reading this I just want to ask you….why? Seriously what was it about this movie that you liked? I’m not judging, I actually want to know. It’s a movie like this that gives me more even more faith that I can one day write a successful screenplay. If this is what I have to beat, I should be more than set.

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