As nasty as I figured it would be (and, contrary to director Ron Howard’s comments, complete with gay jokes at the expense of gays), The Dilemma is one of the worst movies of Mr. Howard’s career, a return to his juvenile acting-out in the Grand Theft Auto era. Neither as crude as an Adam Sandler picture nor as absurdistic as a Will Ferrell vehicle, it is steeped in the Judd Apatow brew of anti-conceptual humor with a conservative aftertaste. Wasting gorgeous shots of star Vince Vaughn’s home base, Chicago, with its lakefront skyline and Green Mill Lounge, reduced here to a backdrop for stupid dance floor antics mocking a same-sex couple, the moral crisis is lame, disrupted by blaring rock interludes, and ridiculous writing, casting and acting. Bleary-eyed train wreck Vaughn and Kevin James play Abbott-and-Costello type best friends and business partners, with a miscast Channing Tatum (Stop-Loss) as the other man, to Winona Ryder’s scheming wife, with hockey, electric cars, and Queen Latifah (Just Wright) tossed in for good measure. No half-wit would behave as idiotically as the Vaughn character does in the face of information that his best friend’s marriage is troubled just as they’re executing an important business plan. The whole plot construct feels false, with lies upon lies and no one except Jennifer Connelly (He’s Just Not That Into You) as Vaughn’s wife as halfway decent (she would have ditched Vaughn’s loser years ago), and the laughs, which mostly fall flat, are at the expense of everyone with a mind. An intervention scene played for laughs is especially awful but what can one expect in a film that makes fun of setting someone on fire. Despite a happy little uptick toward the end, this is nihilism done light, dumbing down the often intelligent Ron Howard,(Frost/Nixon, Apollo 13), partnered in film with seedy Brian Grazer, for the Beavis and Butthead bunch.
