'Couples' is a 'Retreat' from humor

"Couples Retreat" leaves a good cast stranded without a script, although the cast isn't in much of a position to complain.

In this case, the cast wrote it - co-stars Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau contributed most of the material to this ramshackle comedy about a troubled couple (Jason Bateman, Kristen Bell) who recruit six friends for a "vacation" to a tropical island where the staff specializes in marriage counseling.

"Couples Retreat" looks for laughs in the forced march of mandatory therapy for the others, including the happily married Vaughn and Malin Akerman, the barely acquainted Faizon Love and Kali Hawk. Jon Favreau and Kristin Davis play a couple determined to divorce in a few months, when their daughter leaves for college.

The movie works best in the early going when setting up the premise - winterized suburbanites eager to party are instead forced to rise at 6 a.m. for team-building, yoga and other dull, compulsory activities (organized by the island's French relationship guru, played by Jean Reno, in a weirdly flat, underwritten role).

It's during the partners' swim, with the entire cast in bathing suits, that we get an idea of why it's good to be the writer or producer or both. Vaughn and Favreau and Love are apparently more interested in six packs than abs, whereas Bell, Davis, Akerman and Hawk demonstrate that it helps women to be fit as well as funny.

There's a lot of talent here, and they try hard to find the laughs. The cast looks to be ad-libbing a good deal, but no amount of improvisation can rescue "Couples Retreat" from its strange determination to be unfunny as it waddles toward resolution. The movie rapidly loses its energy and edge as it begins an earnest consideration of each bad relationship.

It imposes on its audience the same kind of humorless, therapy-babble grind that island staff enforces on its hapless guests. That won't sit well with fans of Vaughn and Favreau, erstwhile "Swingers" who came for a party.