What Happens in Vegas (12A)

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.

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas and you’ll wish this one had by the time you reach the end of this lacklustre comedy.

Mind you, there can’t be many people out there who think a film starring Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz represents a decent bet for a good night out.

Kutcher and Diaz are just about down and out in Vegas. They have a debauched night in which they end up getting married.

A quickie divorce seems on the cards until he wins $3 million using her money and things get messy.

Is there anyone out there who doesn’t know how this one is going to turn out?

Diaz and Kutcher turn in their usual, self-regarding performances and the whole dispiriting exercise is pretty dire from start to finish.