In The Dilemma, a comedy more interested in moral unease than sexual slapstick, Vince Vaughn and Kevin James play best friends Ronnie Valentine and Nick Brennan, a pair of Chicago car buffs whose small automotive design firm is pitching General Motors their idea of an electric car engine that reproduces the rumble, revs and sheer righteousness of a classic American petrol chomping muscle car. In other words, they’re updating a masculine icon, and slowly you realise that Ron Howard’s movie is trying to do the same with the audience’s perceptions of the two men.
Ronnie and Nick use sporting metaphors for everything from business to a marriage proposal, and one of the interesting ideas that Allan Loeb’s screenplay hints at is that they’re incapable of deep, abiding communication. That becomes problematic when Ronnie stumbles across Nick’s wife, Geneva (Winona Ryder, welcome back), at an assignation with a tattooed younger man, Zip (Channing Tatum). Both because he doesn’t know what to say, and because he’s scared the tripwire tense Nick will lose it on the eve of their career-making deadline, Ronnie doesn’t tell him what he learns.
The knowledge eats at Ronnie, a reformed gambler who’s been trying to take the leap and propose to his chef girlfriend, Beth (Jennifer Connelly). The movie’s comic energy comes from his dissembling and inappropriate responses – he follows Geneva, and finally confronts her, but when she retorts that Nick has stopped sleeping with her, preferring a weekly visit to a massage parlour, Ronnie in turn follows his friend. The more harried he becomes, including getting into a ramshackle fight with Zip, who the square jawed Tatum plays with unexpected comic deftness as a sensitive lug, the more everyone suspects that he’s relapsed into wagering.
Like 2006’s The Break-Up, a picture Vaughn co-wrote and starred in, The Dilemma views relationships on an adult level. It’s not about young men wanting to be boys, instead it’s about two friends on the cusp of 40 who haven’t quite got the emotional wherewithal to face up to the title’s subject. Visually, Howard serves the material unobtrusively (you never realise the height disparity, and what it could entail, between Vaughn and James, for example), but he’s willing to let scenes play out and give them brief, unexpected moments of contemplation.
But the movie has a deep lying flaw in that Nick’s silence grows to such a degree that he’s deceiving everyone, even Beth, long past the point where something would slip out. Nor are the juicier, more complex issues, up for debate: Nick has forsaken Geneva sexually, but it’s never discussed by the two men, and despite a brief attempt to paint her as equally wronged, Ryder’s character slowly evolves into a villain, happy to threaten her old friend over what she’ll tell her husband if he reveals her secret. The film spends too long dancing around the problem’s possibilities, but barely addresses the potential of the solution.
It can’t quite connect interesting possibilities. Queen Latifah, in all her bravado, plays a GM executive waho has so effectively mastered machismo business banter she speaks in erection metphors. 'I want to bang your brain," she tells Nick in a fit of post-meeting enthusiasm, but the character is only used for comic relief, when as the most masculine character in the film she could have played a more integral role. The barrel-like James, a stand-up and sitcom veteran, also has limits to his dramatic capabilities – he never quite dispels the sense that he’s going to start broadly mugging for the camera. He, like The Dilemma, just can’t quite get there.
