Dir: Tom Vaughan
With: Cameron Diaz, Ashton Kutcher, Queen Latifah

Finding the ideal partnership for a romantic comedy is like cracking a safe. There are infinite combinations but only one opens the door to greatness. Take Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher. Two young, gorgeous, fun-loving sorts with all their all own teeth and in Diaz's case considerable comedy chops. Put them together and they should click. In What Happens in Vegas they do, but still the loot remains unclaimed.

Kutcher plays Jack, a man-child New Yorker who works for his unimpressed father and is described by one of his many girlfriends as "not exactly marriage material". Diaz is Joy, a neurotic career girl busy planning her wedding to an uptight, uptown suit. When Jack is fired and Joy is dumped they both go up the hill to Vegas, get drunk, get married, win $3 million and fight each other for the money. It happens. In movies.

Directed by Tom Vaughan, who made the amiable Brit comedy Starter for Ten, with a script by Dana Fox (The Wedding Date), the picture starts promisingly, with the drunken evening the pair spend together in Vegas a riot of fast editing and slapstick. But once the action switches back to New York, where the couple have been ordered by a judge to spend six months together as part of a settlement deal, the battle of the sexes is played out with crashing predictability, jokes about toilet seats being left up and all. Kutcher and Diaz make the thin material seem more than it is through sheer force of personality, but this is ordinary rom-com fare caught between two cities: not bling enough for Vegas, but lacking sufficient bite for the Big Apple.