Remember the controversy over the initial trailer for "The Dilemma," the Ron Howard film starring Vince Vaughn and Kevin James? It had the joke in which Vaughn's character, Ronny, says that "Electric cars are gay. I mean, not homosexual gay, but my-parents-are-chaperoning-the-dance gay." After GLAAD (the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, in case you don't know) complained, the studio removed the joke from the trailer but deferred to director Howard, who wouldn't remove it from the film itself because of artistic integrity or something. I wasn't thrilled by that, though I can understand someone not wanting to be harassed into making changes they feel aren't warranted. But Vaughn made some comments in response to the uproar that really turned me off, and I decided that I did not want to pay money to see this movie.
Still, I was a little curious. So when I went to see "The King's English" last week, I "multiplexed." That's the term I use for "sneaking into another theater to see a second movie without paying." It's something I've only done a couple of times, and once it was just to re-watch the end of another movie I had already seen (and paid for). But Hollywood owed me one for over two years: "The Spirit" was such complete garbage that I walked out more than halfway through. With "The Dilemma," I collected.
Well, I collected in that I stayed throughout the entire film. But it wasn't easy.
The film's premise is that Ronny and his best friend Nick (James) are partners in an auto design firm who get a meeting with GM to make a pitch for an electric car that seems like a muscle car. Hence the "electric cars are gay" joke --
which is a little extended in the film itself, to include visuals of the "gay" electric cars as well as things like a kitten in a tutu, if I recall correctly. Their design, of course, isn't gay at all, and GM decides to finance a prototype.
Later, as Ronny is making arrangements to propose to his longtime girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly) at a botanical garden, he happens to see Nick's wife Geneva (Winona Ryder) cheating on him with a younger, hotter guy (Channing Tatum). At first Ronny wants to tell Nick, but Nick is stressed over the work on their prototype, the success/failure of which will make or break their business. He then confronts Geneva, who says she'll end the affair but doesn't, and then threatens to tell Nick about how she and Ronny had a one-night stand back in college and that Ronny is still hitting on her.
After watching this, and seeing just about every joke fall flat, and with Ronny being a rather boorish and not very likable character throughout, I had the thought that had Ron Howard made this film without all the jokes, "gay" or otherwise, and made it a straight-out thriller, it might have been entertaining. And Kevin James is an underrated actor. This film, though, is an infuriating mess in so many ways, and not worth the money I paid for it. My grade: D-minus.
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