The Dilemma

Directed by Ron Howard

(PG-13)

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If 2011 keeps putting out movies as “lousy and deluded” as The Dilemma, we’re in trouble, said Wesley Morris in The Boston Globe. In this comedy about infidelity, Vince Vaughn and Kevin James play Ronny and Nick, best friends and business partners. Nick is happily married to Geneva (Winona Ryder), and Ronny plans to follow his lead and propose to his own girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly). That plan gets derailed, however, when Ronny catches Nick’s wife kissing another man. The Dilemma’s biggest dilemma is that this conundrum isn’t particularly hilarious, said Justin Chang in Variety. In fact, it’s quite serious. Yet instead of zeroing in on “this to-tell-or-not-to-tell scenario,” director Ron Howard and writer Allan Loeb pile on “a mass of distractingly soapy complications.” This “frantic movie” is not what anybody would have expected from the director who once gave us Splash and Parenthood, said Joe Neumaier in the New York Daily News. It’s understandable that Howard wanted to return to comedy after decades of creating mostly dramatic fare. But has he really lost the ability to see that “this movie isn’t funny”?