Movie Review: The Dilemma

This weekend America faces The Dilemma, a new purported comedy starring Vince Vaughn and Kevin James. The boys play best friends, James the happily married to Winona Ryder man and Vaughn the bachelor who is practically married to Jennifer Connelly, but scared to take the next step guy. The smug, married couple spend the first half of the movie encouraging Vaughn to pop the question and the second half berating him for not knowing how hard it is to be married. They could both stand to look at their own marriage and leave Vaughn alone.Poor Vince Vaughn, just when he thinks he will propose to his girlfriend of multiple years, he catches his best friend’s wife with another man. Should he keep it to himself? Or should he stalk her, confront her, threaten her, beat up the guy she’s seeing and stalk his best friend, all while keeping his girlfriend in the dark and making her think he’s once again succumbed to his gambling addiction? (Oh, yeah, and he’s a gambling addict who apparently put Connelly through hell two years earlier. Why is she with this guy?) Obviously, Vaughn chooses the second option, which all plays along with a subplot (extended car commercial) involving the auto design firm he owns with James trying to score an account with a big company.

Director Ron Howard said on a talk show recently that The Dilemma came about after a friend of his though he’d seen Ron’s wife with another man. Turns out it wasn’t her, but it got the guys to asking, what would you do if you caught your best friend’s wife cheating? In real life, it led to one guy building up the nerve to break the news to his friend, only to find out that he was mistaken. Then there was a sense of relief, a few laughs and a happy ending.

In The Dilemma, there’s no such luck. No laughs. No happy ending. Wait, there are happy endings in this movie. The massage parlor kind that you’ll want to think about one of the characters getting almost as much as you’ll enjoy hearing Queen Latifah’s character, the auto executive, repeatedly refer to her “lady-wood.” Ick. Thought the cast is packed with fan favorites, it’s hard to like any of the characters. What’s worse, the most uplifting dialogue in this movie is Vince Vaughn quoting from the 2004 hockey drama Miracle. You might want to check and see if that’s on Netflix before heading out to see The Dilemma.