First off, I must apologize to Hollywood for an earlier statement. I said when did Hollywood just assume our IQs just dropped precipitously? Rhenish I first wrote that, I thought it was recently, but it wasn't recently. Turns out they have always believed we were incredibly stupid if they thought this stinkburger was comedy. Google's dictionary defines the word comedy thusly,
"professional entertainment consisting of jokes and satirical sketches, intended to make an audience laugh."
Honeymoon In Vegas meets only one of these criteria. It is professional (sort of). It is not entertaining, there are no jokes that I could see except for a good one at the end (which is why this gets one star instead of being a bomb), it does have satirical situations, I guess. But the key is the second part, "intended to make the audience laugh." On this, it fails miserably.
Honeymoon In Vegas starts off innocently enough. A man, played by Nicholas Cage, makes a promise to his domineering mother on her deathbed he will never marry, resulting in severe commitment issues. He meets a wonderful girl (the pretty but oh so tragically horse-faced Sarah Jessica Parker) and they date for years. Finally he relents and takes her to Las Vegas to get married. While there, mobster James Caan sees them and instantly falls in love with her. He cons Cage's character in a card game. In order for Cage to settle the debt, the mobster asks to have Parker's character for the weekend, where Caan then tries to convince her to marry him. Cage then bounces between Nevada and Hawaii and back to Nevada in a desperate attempt to get her back.
God, where do I start? First, at the weekend in Vegas, there is an Elvis impersonator convention going on, so the soundtrack is all Elvis music and there are Elvi everywhere. While this is mildly amusing (and a little surreal), it gets old real fast. You see thin Elvi, fat Elvi, old Elvi, young Elvi, short Elvis, REALLT tall Elvis, black Elvis, Indian (turban and all) Elvi, a kid Elvis, Elvis, Elvis, Elvis. I like Elvis as much as the next person, but it is possible to get too much of a good thing. I thought the Elvis thing was done to much better effect in the quirky (and surprisingly violent) 3000 Miles To Graceland with Kevin Costner and Kurt Russel. The one actually funny joke is that to get back to Vegas from Hawaii, Cage hitches a ride with The Flying Elvises, a skydiving team. Their cavalier attitude towards what they do and how they dress is pretty funny, but this cannot make up for 80 minutes of not-funny that precedes this joke.
Next, it is not the actors' fault they have to read such crap. It is their fault for agreeing to be in such a stupid movie. Nick Cage's performance is great, James Caan plays Sonny Corleone again. But the sad waste is Sarah Jessica Parker. She can do comedy (as we amply saw later in Sex And The City). While she was the weakest link in that show, she is funny and there is a certain something about her. But she and her talents are absolutely wasted in the dumb blonde role of this movie. Granted, she is angry to be passed off as a prize in a bet (And I take it back. There are two good jokes in the movie. When she realizes and then loudly proclaims that Cage has made her a whore in the middle of a crowded room, the reactions of everyone is very funny), but are we honestly expected to believe that she would go from ready to marry a fiancé whom she has dated for 2+ years to move on and marry a much older man after four days in Hawaii? I realize comedy expects us to suspend disbelief to swallow the absurdity of whatever situation we're watching, but this stretches the bounds of reality way too much.
I could go on and on tearing apart this big steaming mass, but suffice to say it is dumb, dumb, dumb, and pretty insulting as well, to women in particular. I guess I am so vehement in this review because I have heard for years how funny film this was supposed to be. Maybe it is a casualty of shifting comedic tastes through the years, but it sucks, and I feel betrayed. It all comes back to story. If you have a good script, the rest will follow. If you have a bad one, well, you can keep a dung beetle as a pet, but you still have two problems. It's a bug and it eats crap, which is exactly what the producers of this film make us do by watching it.
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