The feature-length directorial debut of Ralphie from A Christmas Story doesn’t exactly come across as a harbinger of cinematic excellence, but even at that, Peter Billingsley’s Couples Retreat was a great deal more woeful than anyone could have imagined.
Reading from the Adam Sandler/Happy Madison playbook of “unnecessarily expensive star-studded comedy set in a glamorous sun-kissed location for reasons,” the $60 million romp was admittedly a sizeable hit at the box office after somehow conspiring to earn $172 million from theaters, despite a critical savaging that saw it fly no higher than a dismal 10 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Real-life BFFs Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau are joined by Kristens Bell and Davis, Malin Akerman, Jason Bateman, Jean Reno, Temuera Morrison, and many others in the story of four longtime friends and couples who head off to the titular retreat in order to either work on their marriages or simply have some fun in the sun, but there’s plenty of bickering and painfully unfunny banter to follow.
Couples Retreat even wound up as the subject of a $10 million lawsuit from former model Irina Krupnik, who sued for misappropriation in an invasion of privacy filing after Favreau’s character used an image of her to… pleasure himself. Despite blasting the “derogatory and humiliating” use of her likeness, she ended up with nothing after the judge ruled against her.
A strange footnote to an altogether terrible movie, then, but Couples Retreat has inexplicably managed to avoid trouble in paradise on streaming by becoming one of the Top 10 most-watched titles on Hulu, per FlixPatrol.