A truly underwhelming movie (Spoiler)

qljsystems

The Couch Trip bears all the hallmarks of a failed vehicle to inflate the principal actors' fame at the expense of long-term product saleability. Just watching it, you catch moments that would appear in a trailer - one-liners mostly - yet the overall plot is far-fetched and ridiculous. Some may say that the movie is supposed to reflect the insanity of its protagonist Becker (Dan Aykroyd), but I disagree. The acting is wooden more times than not and the plot's clunkiness is too noticeable to overlook.

Aykroyd delivers his character and dialogue with Aykroydesque aplomb, but never really breaks through an invisible barrier of being... Dan Aykroyd playing an obviously Dan Aykroyd role. Matthau delivers perhaps one truly funny line (see the scene where he literally sucks all the jelly out of the donuts using straws: "If anybody wants a donut without the jelly, they're ready.") but the rest of the time he treads out a tired role in a way that clearly indicates how unhappy he was making this film. Grodin is just more of the same... a pent-up, angst-ridden bag of nervous energy on the verge of a complete mental collapse - a parody of his repertoire - and delivers a prosaic role.

The humour is overtly physical, though much too inferior for successful slapstick. The scripting problems come down to the fact that it was written to the actors' needs rather than the audience's benefit. It accommodates them in all their clichéd glory. No scene illustrates this better than when Aykroyd is in a limousine with the TV on in the background. A semi-witty condom commercial starring Chevy Chase plays - an obvious reference to their on-screen partnership in Spies Like Us - and even here Chase succeeds in being a send-up of himself.

Most of the Saturday Night Live crew were involved in many of memorable family of comedies in the 1980s, of which Aykroyd and Grodin are members. The Couch Trip comes across as a quickly thrown-together, industrially-produced, colour-by-numbers replica of National Lampoons, promising funny actors, never delivering.

It's a lazy piece of film-making that was intended to give Aykroyd more air-time (forgive the unintentional word use) and barely makes use of Matthau except as a parody of himself.

Truly unforgettable.

score /10

qljsystems 24 November 2004

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0970237/