Not really a refreshing vacation, Couples Retreat. Instead, expect the kind of thrills you’d get on a wet summer’s day in Butlins.

Starting off well, Couples Retreat sees Vince Vaughn dream up an idea about a holiday resort for couples – who get to indulge in the fine food, the bright blue water and the pristine sands, but only after they have finished partaking in the non-negotiable therapy courses. Hilarity should ensue, and at first it looks set to do just that.

Vaughn is joined by his old friend and sometime Iron Man director Jon Favreau in both acting and scripting duties. Surprisingly, the Swingers duo manage to change roles from their debut outing. Here Favreau manages to be the loose womaniser with questionable morals, while Vince looks on with a few sharp, well-placed one-liners. You’d think the film was an exercise in bringing this couple back together. It’s not, though – a supporting cast features more familiar faces.

The purpose of filling the film with these four sets of couples is clearly to make it relate on some level with different members of the audience – a trick that is sure to work. Jason Bateman is always a welcome addition to any cast, and here he plays the uptight but seemingly happily husband of Kristen Bell’s Cynthia. Of all the couples, they are the most difficult to accept as a real pairing. Sticking glasses on a hot woman does not make her a nerd. Cinematic history has taught this lesson on several occasions, but this couple is even harder to swallow considering how old the two are – presumably he proposed to her when she was an embryo.

As the couples embark on the resort, they are first shown around and taken aback by its beauty, as is the audience. We Brits may notice Shaun of the Dead and Spaced alumni Peter Serafinowicz playing the resorts manager, Sctanley, who insists his name is spelt with a ‘C’. An odd role and not one as nearly as funny as the film thinks it is. As the couples indulge in the therapy, we get to meet the therapists (a scene stealing Michael John Higgins is a stand-out) and also the resort’s owner Marcel, played by Jean Reno.

The film packs in plenty of characters and, as they first take part in the therapy sessions, it amuses – especially the awkward yoga scene with an overly enthusiastic instructor. The characters soon start realising truths about themselves and, after the young Trudy runs away to the neighbouring island, they find themselves following her.

Trudy’s exile occurs in the last third of the film, the toughest part of any film to master. Before this, it moves along at a nice enough pace with a few chuckles here and there to make this a likeable, if not unspectacular comedy. But never before have we witnessed such a sudden drop in quality.

Alarm bells start ringing after the utterly illogical motives of the leads as they split off. Some turn character for no other reason than to create conflict and to propel the plot in a certain direction. One scene involves Dave (Vaughn) having a face-off on Guitar Hero with Sctanley – a scene that is woeful between two adults to begin with, but soon becomes the most spectacularly badly edited sequence in a major movie of the 21st century.

Then as they reach the ‘party island’ they resolve all their issues in the midst of all the drinking and dancing. It becomes a repulsive display of a cinematic closure, one made more offensive by the sudden appearance of Shane’s (Faizon Love) ex-wife. The film then pretends that all this was part of the therapy and that the infinitely wise Marcel knew what was coming and what everyone would do, and implausibly gives them all wooden animals to represent their spirit.

Now the film is all wrapped up in a nice package and as the credits roll we get treated to snaps of the stars jet-skiing, swimming with dolphins and enjoying the sun, sea and sand. It soon becomes apparent that some idiot studio executive has just paid a bunch of actors to go on an extended holiday.

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Good for Vince Vaughn. After Fred Claus and Four Christmases, people thought he could only make godawful Christmas films.

But who’s laughing now? Couples Retreat – the newest Vince Vaughn movie – is the number one movie at the weekend box office, so take that everyone. Couples Retreat has proved once and for all that Vince Vaughn doesn’t only make godawful Christmas films – he makes godawful films that are completely independent of traditional religious festivals, as well. Vince Vaughn wins again!

Oh, and Couples Retreat co-star Jon Favreau wins again, too! God knows how badly that man needed a hit movie.

So Couples Retreat is the number one movie at the US weekend box office. We for one are pleased to hear it – after all, it has a who’s who of comedy for a cast list, including Fred Claus, that fat bloke who always has bit-parts in Vince Vaughn films, the woman from Ben Stiller’s forgotten 2007 The Heartbreak Kid remake, Leon, the least interesting one from Sex And The City, someone from Who’s Your Caddy and Jason Bateman from Teenwolf Too. That has weekend box office success written all over it, doesn’t it?

Anyway, enough of this nonsense. Let’s crack on with the weekend box office top five…

1 – Couples Retreat (We’re disappointed that Couples Retreat is the weekend box office number one, because its success might stop Vince Vaughn from making any more Christmas movies. Because, come on, what says Christmas more than a fat bloke endlessly yammering a bunch of directionless flabby ad-libs in an embarrassing film that you feel somehow tricked into watching?) $35,340,000

2 - Zombieland (Hands up who else heard that Zombieland was a movie about a violent idiot running around a land full of drooling, unthinking walking cadavers and immediately assumed that it was a documentary about the Isle Of Sheppy? No? Just us?) $15,000,000

3 - Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs (Let’s just all agree that we ran out of things to say about this movie long ago and move on. Deal?) $12,000,000

4 - Toy Story / Toy Story 2 (3D) (Looks like re-releasing Toy Story in 3D made a lot of financial success. And that means one thing – the Alvin & The Chipmunks 3D re-release can only be days away. Hooray!) $7,674,000

5 - Paranormal Activity (A Blair Witch-style mockumentary that some people are calling the scariest film ever. By people who haven’t seen Big Momma’s House 2, presumably) $7,066,000

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Probably. And Vince Vaughn’s possibly-fictitious property fetish goes even further – not only do we expect that he often rubs his groin up and down the kitchen section of Habitat, but he’s also just got engaged to real estate agent Kyla Weber.

Amusingly, the details of Vince Vaughn’s engagement are spectacularly vague – but all that matters is that Vince Vaughn is happy. And also that Jennifer Aniston will have definitely railroaded John Mayer into getting engaged to her by teatime.

On the surface you might not think that Vince Vaughn and Charlie Sheen have a lot in common, but they do. For instance, neither one of them is quite as funny as they think they are, plus they both have high-profile exes who, while pretty, couldn’t be more needy if they were literally homeless. But most of all, both Vince Vaughn and Charlie Sheen have fallen in love with real estate agents.

Charlie got married to Brooke Mueller a couple of years ago, and now Vince Vaughn looks set to do the same – he’s reportedly got engaged to real estate agent Kyla Weber. The LA Times reports:

We heard that Vaughn had dropped to one knee and presented her a $125,000, four-carat ring on Valentine’s Day. No word on when or where the two will get married. Rumors are that they met while vacationing in Venice, Calif., or in Italy, possibly through a movie producer friend of Vaughn’s.

It’s this attention to detail that’s made us fall in love with this story. Vince Vaughn and Kyla Weber met in Venice, California. Unless they met in Venice in Italy. Or the Venice in Louisiana. Or the at the lunchtime all you can eat pasta buffet at the Little Venice restaurant in Basingstoke. Or at a concert by the big-in-Holland band Venice. Or at a meeting with Dennis Pennis. But definitely one of those. And definitely almost a month ago.

But what is it about moviestars and real estate agents that make for such a perfect coupling, anyway? Is it the way that both jobs call for sincerity and dedication? The fact that they’re both involved in businesses where things cost several times more than they’re actually worth? Or the way that moviestars are both incredibly rich and massively gullible because they’ve never actually lived in the real world, a combination that’s irresistable to most real estate agents?

In the end, though, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that Vince Vaughn has, possibly for the first time in his life, fallen in love with someone who doesn’t constantly compare him to Brad Pitt or make him do a Tyler Durden voice when he talks to her on the phone or force him to pretend that he was in Meet Joe Black instead of the Psycho remake when he’s with her friends. And Vince Vaughn will almost definitely never have to go on Oprah to explain his relationship this time around.

And who knows? This engagement to Kyla Weber might even bring out a whole new side to Vince Vaughn. And if it’s a side that doesn’t spoil every single movie by babbling on like an unfunny stream-of-consciousness wiseguy, that’d be a wonderful bonus. Fingers crossed.

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It just goes to show – at this time of year, moviegoers like nothing more than to snuggle down and enjoy lighthearted festive japes starring two of America’s most recognisable comic stars. That’s why Four Christmases has topped the US weekend box office for the second week running.

Well, it’s either that or because the most high-profile movie released on Friday was Punisher: War Zone, a film that looks as if it’s almost aggressively bumhole. Either one’s fine.

Two weeks at the top of the weekend box office? You know what this means – it means that Four Christmases is a hit! Reese Witherspoon must be so thrilled - Four Christmases is the first really successful movie she’s made since she won that Oscar for Walk The Line.

Hopefully now Reese has realised that she’s good at making this sort of lighthearted fluff and awful at making serious issues-based dramas that are put into production solely because she thinks it’ll get her an Oscar like Rendition. So what does IMDb say Reese Witherspoon’s next film will be? Monsters Vs Aliens. Sadly, that’s not the forthcoming knockabout 3D animated comedy, but a done-dry movie about the moral grey area that surrounds immigration control and human trafficking. Oh, Reese, will you ever learn? Here’s the US weekend box office top five…

1 - Four Christmases (Two weeks at the top of the weekend box office? Uh-oh – we smell a sequel. And that means we should all get set for Five Christmases, where Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon spend their Christmas day visiting Reese’s mother, Reese’s father, Vince’s mother, Vince’s father and Vince’s one-legged orphan boy lovechild who was oddly never mentioned in the first film. Mark our words) $18,180,000

2 - Twilight (Make the most of Twilight’s weekend box office success while you can, fans of abstinence-promoting vampire romances, for it won’t last for long – any day now JK Rowling is going to sign over the film rights to The Tales Of Beedle The Bard, and your weird little phenomenon is going to be blown out of the water. What’s more, it’ll be blown out of the water by something called Babbity Rabbity And Her Cackling Stump. Oh, the ignominy!) $13,197,000

3 - Bolt (A 3D remake of the Buzz Lightyear plot from Toy Story starring an animated dog with the voice of John Travolta. To save the cost of admission, we hear you can experience a fairly close approximation of the Bolt experience by getting shitfaced on fermented cheese and then falling asleep on a ghost train) $9,696,000

4 - Australia (Australia has yet to make the weekend box office impression that everyone hoped – unlike Madagascar, which has so far ratcheted up close to $165 million at the domestic box office. Australia had better pray that nobody releases a blockbuster movie called Greenland any time soon, because then Australia would be relegated to the bronze medal position of unusually large yet ultimately pointless islands with movies named after them) $7,000,000

5 - Quantum Of Solace (Still here? This isn’t a good sign – if 007 producers work out that their films do better if they’re obviously stupid, then we may as well accept that the next Bond film will contain nothing but James Bond kicking a dead cow in the eye and laughing at his own farts) $6,600,000

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Weekend Box Office – Box Office Mojo

In fact, Four Christmases has done so much better that it’s the top movie at the US weekend box office this week, beating off cultish vampire phenomenons, big-budget historical epics and dumb actioners alike.

That’s great news for Vince Vaughn and the cast and crew of Four Christmases, but don’t think that first paragraph was a compliment – just to add a little bit of perspective, here’s a list of other things that are better than Fred Claus: Bridge To Terabithia, I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry, Alvin And The Chipmunks, YouTube videos of people getting injured, genital herpes, crying pensioners, papercuts and smacking yourself about the face with a brick. Doesn’t make Four Christmases look so good in comparison, does it?

It looks like Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon are back. After woeful turns at hamfisted kid’s films (Fred Claus) and depressingly bleak films about screaming women that apparently have something to do with the war (Rendition), their new movie Four Christmases is top of the weekend box office.

The weekend box office success of Four Christmases just goes to show that Vince Vaughn was right to only ever make bawdy yet sentimental Christmas movies these days. Just as well, since he’s now booked up to 2012 with the following movies: Jingle Balls, Merry Christmas To Ewe, Jeff’s Nuts Roasting On An Open Fire and I Saw Mommy Dicking Santa Claus. Here’s the weekend box office top five…

1 - Four Christmases (SPOILER ALERT – you know what our favourite part of Four Christmases was? The part where Vince Vaughn burbled on monotonously in his self-consciously hip way about whatever seemed to ambiently drift into his mind at any given moment in time regardless of what was going on around him FOR THE ENTIRE FILM. Oh, and one of Reese Witherspoon’s dresses was quite nice also) $31,680,000

2 - Bolt (The highest-opening 3D movie ever it might be, but Bolt deserves to be famous for so much more than that. For example, Bolt is the only movie made in the last couple of years that doesn’t make John Travolta’s hair look weird and artificial and fake. And, yes, we do realise that in Bolt John Travolta plays a computer-animated dog. We’re just saying) $26,596,000

3 - Twilight (OK, we’ll admit that all our constant bashing of Twilight recently has been based on nothing but jealousy. Teenagers of today get to relate their adolescent problems to a gang of sexy, charisma-free vampires, but what did we have when we were their age? 3 Ninjas Kick Back and that Flash advert starring Karl Howman. Those lucky bloody teenagers, they don’t they’re born) $26,370,000

4 - Quantum Of Solace (We’ve been blathering on about Quantum Of Solace forever now, so we’re going to ignore it this week and concentrate on a movie that didn’t get into the weekend box office top five despite being widely hyped – Transporter 3. Why did Transporter 3 fail? Is it because Transporter 1 & 2 were humongous piles of steaming fart? Yes, yes that’s it exactly) $19,500,000

5 – Australia (Number five? For a movie as hyped as Australia? Is that it? Why did Australia fail? Is it because the movie is too long and self-indulgent? Is it because nobody wanted to break Nicole Kidman’s world-beating streak of deeply unpopular movies? Is it because Nicole Kidman didn’t want to break her own world-beating streak of movies where nobody can tell what emotion she’s trying to convey with her face? Or was it because the movie is called Australia and therefore everybody assumed it’d be about a bunch of smug backpackers going to Sydney for a fortnight and then boring all their friends shitless by banging on about what an amazing time they had? The answer to all? Yes) $14,815,000

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Weekend Box Office – Box Office Mojo

But Four Christmases isn’t just any old inescapably terrible Vince Vaughn Christmas film. No, Four Christmases is the Christmas film where Vince Vaughn and his co-star Reese Witherspoon apparently decided that they absolutely hated each other during filming, making the shoot a nightmare for everybody involved.

Except if you ask Reese Witherspoon about that, she’ll tell you it’s all hooey. Looking to dispel those rumours, Reese Witherspoon has come forward to say that she didn’t hate Vince Vaughn at all, and that he’s the funniest actor she’s ever worked with. Reese should be careful what she says; Jennifer Aniston once thought the same about Vince Vaughn and look what happened to her – John Mayer. Gree.

It’s Christmas soon, and do you know what that means? It means it’s time to go and watch a staggeringly disappointing Christmas movie where Vince Vaughn gets to play the exact same fast-talking character that Vince Vaughn has ever played, and there’s snow and stuff.

That’s right – Four Christmases is released this week, and it’s the perfect film for anyone who sat through all of Fred Claus and didn’t once feel like pulling their eyes out and pushing them up their bum. But only those people.

However, even though superficially it looks like Four Christmases is yet another movie where Vince Vaughn yammers away endlessly, falsely convinced of his own comedic genius, and then learns a sappy lesson about the value of family at the end, it also has its own USP. Four Christmases is apparently the Vince Vaughn/ Reese Witherspoon hate movie.

Last year it was reported that Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon were clashing furiously on the set of Four Christmases because Reese Witherspoon is an Oscar-winning actress who likes preparation and Vince Vaughn usually ignores the script to just blather “Hummana hummana hummana. Hummana? Hummana HUMMANA!” for hours at a time until he says enough words to allow an editor to individually splice the original line back together. Or something.

It didn’t sound like a happy set at all but, now that Four Christmases is actually being released, Reese Witherspoon has decided to deny everything. You know what? Actually she loves Vince Vaughn. AFP reports:

“Every co-star I ever work with I’m either having an affair with him, I’m about to get married with him, or having a baby or we absolutely cannot stand each other. We got along great, we were very good friends and we were very much partners on this movie. Vince is the funniest person I’ve ever worked with. It was a challenge for me to stay there and keep up with him. But I feel really a better actor for that experience.”

Wow, that told us. So, on behalf of everyone, we’d like to apologise to Reese Witherspoon. We don’t know where the rumours about you always hooking up with your co-stars came from. Certainly not from the time you married Ryan Phillipe right after Cruel Intentions was released. Or the time you got together with Jake Gyllenhaal, pretty much the first co-star you had after the divorce from Ryan came through. Certainly not those two facts.

And also, while we’re in hole-picking mode, it seems a bit unlikely that Vince Vaughn is the funniest person you ever worked with, Reese. Remember that you also made a film with Joaquin Phoenix once. And he is funny. Or he smells funny, at least. That’s the main thing.

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It seems to work for Vince Vaughn, because he’s just been named as Forbes‘ most valuable actor. For every dollar that Vince Vaughn was paid for Dodgeball, The Break-Up and Wedding Crashers, he pulled in $14.71 of gross income for his studios.

That’s impressive stuff, and Vince Vaughn should be incredibly proud of his achievements. Speaking of which, Vince Vaughn should also be incredibly proud next year when Forbes calculates his salary against Fred Claus and that awful-looking Christmas movie he’s making with Reese Witherspoon and names him as its most overpaid one-note, off-script, pointlessly rambling unfunny egobeast.

Goodness, when did Hollywood get so money-fixated? This week we haven’t been able to turn around without seeing Hollywood’s smug face crowing about The Dark Knight being the biggest film ever or how much money Will Smith makes. It upsets us, especially since we think this obsession with money will eventually drive out smaller movies that deal with serious social issues, like all the little Eddie Murphys who live inside the head of a bigger Eddie Murphy.

But when every little aspect of filmmaking is analysed and cost-calculated to within an inch of its life, you’re bound to throw up an anomaly or two. Which brings us along nicely to the fact that Vince Vaughn has just been named as the most valuable star in Hollywood.

It’s a simple enough idea – you take the salary of an actor and the gross of the films they’ve starred in and see how many audience dollars you can get for every one that the actor was paid. Last year Matt Damon was named as the most valuable star, for example. And this year it’s Vince Vaughn.

Why? Because Dodgeball, Wedding Crashers and The Break-Up were all huge hits, despite one of them being suicide-inducingly crap, and they were made when Vince Vaughn couldn’t demand ridiculously large fees just to turn up and tediously ad-lib through every scene ignoring everything in the script. The Associated Press reports:

Vaughn raked in $14.73 of gross income for studios for every dollar he was paid for “The Break-up,” “Wedding Crashers” and “Dodgeball.” “That’s because until recently his salary was relatively low, and the films he was in had modest budgets yet did extremely well at the box office worldwide,” Forbes said.

That’s likely to be the only taste of success that Vince Vaughn will get in this field, because now he’s one of the most highly-paid actors in Hollywood, and he makes dreck like Fred Claus – pretty much a failure on all counts – and the dreadful-sounding Four Christmases, chances are his score is going to bottom out quite spectacularly soon.

Still, if that happens Vince Vaughn shouldn’t worry – math-based formulas like this are no indication of acting talent. Look at the bottom of the list – Nicole Kidman only brings in $1.01 for every dollar she’s paid, and she’s won an Oscar. True, we wouldn’t pay to see any of her movies if you waterboarded us into it, but that’s not the point. Is it?

But just because The Break-Up was so dire that it makes us want to vomit poo into an elf's face, it doesn't mean that its stars Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston don't get along. In fact, although they spilt up in 2006, Vince Vaughn has told Parade magazine that he's still great friends with Jennifer Aniston.

If this means there's going to be a sequel to The Break-Up any time soon, so help us…

Jennifer Aniston strikes us as possibly the worst ex-girlfriend in the history of everything. Look at how she coped when Brad Pitt dumped her for Angelina Jolie – she screamed at the sea, she organised pity-parties, she complained bitterly at every turn and she junked almost everything he owned, all the while giving off the impression of the bitterest woman that ever did live.

However, right after Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston rebounded into Vince Vaughn. They did all the things that lovers typically do – they moved in together, they starred in a film together that was so terrible it made us want to tear our hair out and braid it into a golden rope and hang ourselves with it, they spoke of getting married and then they split up once the DVD promotion came to an end.

History says that at this point Vince Vaughn should have built himself a concrete bunker in the desert to escape Jennifer Aniston's neverending fiery wrath, but he didn't. Oddly, Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston are still friends with each other. Just to blow your minds even further, Vince Vaughn told Parade magazine:

"I have such a great friendship with Jennifer. I still talk to her constantly. I have a real, genuine connection with Jen. I also have a real appreciation of her. That continues to this day. I always try to keep my relationships quiet and my work at the forefront. I haven't been someone to go and talk about those things, because that's not what I want to be known for. In regular life, people date, and sometimes it works out, and sometimes it doesn't. We just get more attention because we're more known."

Now hold on, because here's where things get complicated. This means that Vince Vaughn still likes Jennifer Aniston but dislikes Reese Witherspoon, who played Jennifer Aniston's sister in Friends. It seems like there's some rather severe Friends-cast friendship inconsistencies going on here on Vince's part. We wonder how he feels about Christina Applegate, who played Jennifer Aniston's other sister in Friends.

Probably deep ambivalence. Much like the rest of us.

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Vince Vaughn's Aniston bond – Monsters And Critics

It's been reported that Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon keep clashing on the set of Four Christmases, thanks to Reese's insistence that each scene is planned and perfected in advance being at direct odds with Vince Vaughn's preference to just roll up at the last minute and yammer stuff off the top of his head. One thing's for sure – Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn had better fall in line pretty quickly and decide whether they want Four Christmases to be hammy and overacted or lame and half-hearted, because if they're both pulling in different directions then the movie runs the very real risk of being neither of those things at all.

Woe betide any of Vince Vaughn's co-stars, that's our warning. Look at the evidence - Owen Wilson was in Wedding Crashers with Vince Vaughn and he tried to kill himself. Jennifer Aniston was in The Break-Up with Vince Vaughn and they ended up doing it. We don't know which of those is worse.

And it doesn't stop there. Before she was in Fred Claus, Rachel Weisz was an Oscar-winning serious actress, but thanks to Vince Vaughn her latest film sees her babbling in one of the most badly-defined cockney accents we've heard this side of Ocean's Thirteen. So Reese Witherspoon had better watch out unless she wants to end up almost dead, sexually attracted to Vince Vaughn or cockney now that she's co-starring in a movie with him.

That's unless she stabs him to death first. Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon are starring together in Four Christmases, a movie about how hilarious it is to visit other people for Christmas especially when each of the people you visit is a broadly-drawn comedy stereotype except the last one who's probably a bit sad and heartbreaky. Four Christmases also stars Jon Favreau, Tim McGraw and Dwight Yoakim, but that's not important, because all the talk at the moment is about how much Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon hate each other.

The Vaughn/ Witherspoon clash is all to do with preparation, apparently. Reports suggest that while Reese Witherspoon prefers to rehearse and rehearse to define nuance and subtlety, Vince Vaughn likes to barge on set as the cameras start rolling and make up a lot of fast-talking nonsense that hasn't got anything to do with anything. According to a source:

"Vince rolls onto set in the morning looking like he just came in from a night out, while Reese will arrive early looking camera-ready. Then Reese tries to force Vince into blocking out each scene and running through their lines as Vince tries to convince her that he's an ad-libber and wants to play around and see where the scene goes. She's a one-take perfectionist and Vince likes to try it a few different ways. Sometimes Vince will be standing behind her and he has this look on his face that he just wants to kill her!"

It's a tricky predicament, that's for sure. One the one hand you've got an Oscar-winning actress and on the other hand you've got an actor whose instincts have been proven time and time again. Both have a perfectly valid argument and both also have the ability to tear the movie apart. That's a worry, but just think how much more of a worry it'd be if all normal people hadn't already been so turned off by Fred Claus that they've decided they'd rather bury their heads in a snakepit than watch another Vince Vaughn Christmas movie in their lifetime.

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Report: Reese Witherspoon, Vince Vaughn Clash on Set – Fox