It takes a special kind of mainstream mush to waste Vince Vaughn, Kevin James, Winona Ryder, Jennifer Connelly and your money all at once. Screenwriter Alan Loeb and director Ron Howard have found the formula. They’ve made a movie so mediocre that it’s completely self-neutralizing. 

It’s all there in the trailer. Even the fact that seeing the trailer obviates seeing the whole film is there in the trailer.

The bromance between Ronny (Vaughn) and Nick (James) began some 20 years ago when they were in college. Now they’re business partners, starting up something to do with engines that can help make electric cars sound less “gay.” That’s Ronny’s pitch, anyway. He’s the sales guy; Nick makes the engines.

Nick has a wife, Geneva (Ryder). Ronny has a girlfriend, Beth (Connelly). Ronny admires Nick and Geneva’s marriage, but can’t quite bring himself to propose to Beth. Over a casual double-date dinner, Ronny wonders with exaggerated anxiety whether you can ever really know anyone. 

Certainly you can’t ever really know the characters in The Dilemma, as they barely even exist. But you can at least know their plot-point characteristics. For instance, Ronny soon discovers Geneva having an affair, but doesn’t know if or how he should tell Nick. 

That would be the dilemma. 

Also, Ronny and Geneva have a smidge of history that Nick doesn’t know about. And Ronny has a gambling addiction. And Nick has an ulcer. And Channing Tatum has tattoos. And Queen Latifah has “lady wood.” In other words, what should escalate as a series of comic, poignant and at least barely plausible complications instead just becomes a weird and wearisome degeneration. There’s some overheated talk about honesty, then some overheated slapstick.

It’s been more than a decade since Howard’s last (intentional) comedy. Having since then delineated various conspiracies—including the rococo fictions of Dan Brown and Richard Nixon—he’s at last ready to rip the lid off the suspicious appeal of bland, doughy, early-middle-aged movie dudes to slender, pretty starlets. The truth we always suspected is that the starlets have unmet needs. 

And so the least false element about The Dilemma is its operational notion that Channing Tatum might be more appealing to a woman than Kevin James—not that this explains or makes up for all the mugging Tatum does to prove it. 

The others do their share of mugging too, of course—particularly Vaughn, putting himself through the usual paces of wacky humiliation. The movie is mostly his, and he’s really all it’s got. His way of setting up other actors for laughs still seems generous, if that word applies to a film whose motives can only be mercenary and whose comic timing is so oddly strained. It’s not wholly unfunny. Just unnecessary.

The Dilemma
Directed by
Ron Howard
With Vince Vaughn, Kevin James, Winona Ryder, Jennifer Connelly, Channing Tatum, Queen Latifah

Dreamcatcher, Regal Stadium 14
118 min.
PG-13