Women: don’t fuck Vince Vaughn. Men: don’t tell Vince Vaughn you’re fucking anyone. It’s odd that considering Hollywood’s most forceful comedic personalities, the most compelling body of work not from a formal aesthetic but a thematic one belongs to Vince Vaughn. Through “The Break-Up” to “Couples Retreat,” no other onscreen comedic persona has been as obsessed with infidelity as Vaughn, who usually has a generous impact on the content of the for-hire material he gets involved with. We’re a little downtrodden that a previous generation probably had Woody Allen dealing with these issues instead of fucking “Fred Claus,” but when Vaughn teams up with an Oscar-winning director to present his latest autopsy of adultery (even one as milquetoast as goddamn Ron Howard), it’s probably time to acknowledge either 1) Vince Vaughn has something to say here, or, more likely, 2) Don’t trust Vince Vaughn.
Vince Vaughn Is Not To Be Trusted; Aligns With Ron Howard For Infidelity Dramedy
Based off an idea by Brian Grazer, produced by Vaughn and Imagine Entertainment and adapted into a script by Allan Loeb (“Wall Street 2“), the untitled film, which would shoot next year, concerns a man who finds out his best friend’s wife is cheating, only to struggle with what to do with the knowledge. This is a Vince Vaughn film, so we’ll guess the other man is Jon Favreau and these situations will occur: 1) He will stumble with his words and his friend will think he’s coming out of the closet. 2) The cheating wife will try to hit on him because, you know, bitches be crazy? 3) His friend will find out and irrationally lash out with an act of violence against him that will be portrayed for laughs. 4) You’ll be dating a significant other with terrible taste when this comes out and they will make you sit through each and every simpering, stupid, sitcom-level event in the film, and you will regret not leaving this person sooner.
Goddamned Ron Howard, who’s last film was the eye-gougingly boring “Angels and Demons,” will be behind the camera, helming what will be his first comedy since the really terrible “EdTV.” Putting aside how awful and guileless he is as a filmmaker, he has the post-Oscar career-making skills of Cuba Gooding Jr., and we’d say “Frost/Nixon” (which wasn’t very good) is to Howard as the Nicky Barnes role in “American Gangster” was to Cuba, which is to say a squandered opportunity to show people you’re not a talentless, risk-averse jackass. In spite of how terrible his films are, Howard movies make bank – so why does he want to direct a secondhand idea from a second-rate comic actor who hasn’t starred in an interesting movie in over a decade?
Vaughn’s paddled in these waters far too often and reaped far too few interesting results for us to want to tune in again. The braying merrymaker has been looking more and more listless in each passion-less role he takes, and is frankly starting to return to the puffy, coked-out look he had in “Domestic Disturbance” a decade ago. Was he that burnt out from the hate he generated as the new Norman Bates in that “Psycho” redo back in the ’90s? Looking at Vaughn’s early career, there aren’t many gems, but there’s a nice mix of genres, with different sizes of projects all over the place. However, in recent years, it’s one dumbass laugh-fest after another, with a disturbing reliance on the trials and tribulations of wayward couples who probably hate each other (either that or Vaughn has absolutely no onscreen chemistry with any woman). Whomever it is that broke his heart and drove him to this dark place, could she please return to him so we won’t have to sit through his fratboy douchebags waxing sophomorically about the nature of the contemporary relationship? “Wedding Crashers” was dumb fun, but if you’re not gonna step it up, we call for a moratorium, because everything since has been largely trash.