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.