The Dilemma movie video clips

Not that you can't make a comedy about marital dysfunction, a cheating spouse, dishonest best friend, addictive personality and violent rage. But it better be very dark or edging into farce. The Dilemma is so tone deaf to its themes that it thinks it's a light and slightly rude Vince Vaughn movie. It's not.

Nevertheless, The Dilemma is counting on -- indeed, its only box-office hope lies in -- Vaughn's mysterious alchemy with audiences that love to love him as an undeniable louse. Chalk one up for Vince if The Dilemma has any legs at all.

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The dilemma movie overview

But it’s The Dilemma that really lays there. Vaughn’s Ronny and James’s Nick are auto-industry vets looking to score a new contract, and their big idea is practically a metaphor for the inner world of men-children. Explaining to executives that electric cars are “totally gay,” Ronny proposes a responsible, energy-efficient vehicle that makes loud vroom-vroom noises like those cool old Fords and Dodges. (At the risk of sounding “gay,” I don’t think we need more road noise in this world.) The movie turns on their women, though. Longtime bachelor Ronny thinks hard about taking the commitment plunge with his dull girlfriend, Beth (Jennifer Connelly), getting his cues from the happy marriage of Nick and Geneva (Winona Ryder). Then, while practicing his proposal at an indoor nursery, he spies Geneva smooching a heavily tattooed Channing Tatum. Should he tell his buddy and shatter him, and maybe ruin the project on which everything in their lives rides? Or should he — for now — keep it a secret? His contortions, moral and physical (lots of spying and tripping over things), occupy the next 90 minutes.

Perhaps the late Blake Edwards could have found a balance between slapstick and psychodrama, but Ron Howard can’t get the pacing right, and Allan Loeb’s script is even wordier than the one he wrote for Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Vaughn has a couple of very funny scenes and Winona Ryder a good demonic glint, but the movie cheats like mad: The noisy engine on which so much of the plot hangs isn’t affected one way or another by all the domestic chaos. The Dilemma comes down to whether Ronny can help the cuckolded Nick recover his masculine pride. This is symbolized by a scene in a pro-hockey arena in which, cheered on by his bud, Nick enters a contest to use his big stick to drive a puck into a small black hole. Even Dr. Freud would roll his eyes and tell the filmmakers to grow the hell up.

The dilemma movie cast and crew

Directed by
Ron Howard


Vince Vaughn

Kevin James

Jennifer Connelly
 
Winona Ryder

Channing Tatum

Queen Latifah

Amy Morton

Chelcie Ross

Eduardo N. Martinez

The dilemma review

Not that you can't make a comedy about marital dysfunction, a cheating spouse, dishonest best friend, addictive personality and violent rage. But it better be very dark or edging into farce. The Dilemma is so tone deaf to its themes that it thinks it's a light and slightly rude Vince Vaughn movie. It's not.

Nevertheless, The Dilemma is counting on -- indeed, its only box-office hope lies in -- Vaughn's mysterious alchemy with audiences that love to love him as an undeniable louse. Chalk one up for Vince if The Dilemma has any legs at all.

Howard and writer Allan Loeb cook up a kind of buddy movie with a disturbing undertow. Ronny (Vaughn) and Nick (Kevin James), best friends since college, form a motor engine design team. Ronny is the smarmy salesman -- he seals their deals with aggressive, often inappropriate guy humor -- while Nick is the "mad scientist" who does the actual work. They've been best buds so long that Nick has never really examined the basic inequality in all this.

But the crux of the matter, the "dilemma" if you will, is that Ronny discovers Nick's wife Geneva (Winona Ryder) is cheating on him like mad. But how does he break the news to his buddy, especially when a make-or-break business presentation is already eating new holes in Nick's stomach lining?

If you're in a Vince Vaughn movie, Ronny will do everything wrong, yet by the credit roll everyone will insist he did the right thing. What is interesting here, if anything is at all, is how Howard and Loeb sugarcoat the sheer nastiness that takes place.

When Vaughn slinks around like a snake in the grass in an arboretum to spy on Ryder and her highly tattooed inamorato, played by a luckless Channing Tatum, he develops a huge physiological reaction to its many poisonous plants. Are you laughing yet? When he climbs an apartment building to snap photos of the adulterous couple, he nearly forgets to take off the lens cap -- does that qualify as a joke any more? -- then gets into a vicious fight with the lover that borders on the psychotic on both sides. Don't guns and blowtorches tickle your funny bone?

Throw in Vaughn's gambling addiction, there only for a lame plot point, and you have a movie that raises serious issues only to trivialize them. At the point Vaughn's character tries to initiate a spiritual barter agreement with God -- on a bus stop covered with product placement, no less -- you want to page, from the Great Beyond, both Billy Wilder and Blake Edwards. Only they could make a comedy out of such dicey material.

The movie strands several talented actresses, who have nothing to do other than gape in disbelief at the male characters' incomprehensible stupidity. Along with Ryder, Jennifer Connelly, as Vaughn's unaware girlfriend, and Queen Latifah, in an unusually pointless roles as an automotive consultant, must find avenues into a story that essentially uses them for plot devices.

The film opens with a dinner scene where the buddies and their women actually discuss the movie's topic, which is: Can you ever say you really know someone, even your significant other? The movie's final answer, despite a forced feel-good ending, is no, your spouse or buddy is probably being dishonest with you in some fundamental way. But do Howard and Loeb even realize that's what they're saying?