Not that "What Happens in Vegas" is any kind of great movie, but it's an exceedingly bright comedy that never makes you feel stupid for enjoying its brisk pacing, smart lines, sound construction and superb comic acting, not only from Ashton Kutcher but from Cameron Diaz and well-chosen No. 2 bananas Rob Corddry and Lake Bell.

The gimmick is at least as old as "The 39 Steps": The plot invents circumstances by which two attractive people, who hold deep aversions to each other, are linked (by handcuffs either actual or, as in this case, metaphorical) and must contend with all kinds of dilemmas. You know what happens next because you understand how perfect they are for each other.

Kutcher and Diaz, each having suffered a crushing disaster (she, dumped; he, fired), have gone to Vegas for some healing. They meet one drunken evening, and they have Olympic-quality sex. Alas, they also get married. Okay, time for quickie divorce, no harm, no foul; except she gives him a quarter, he feeds it into a slot machine and they win $3 million. Who gets it? Greedily, each tries to get the whole pot, and an irritable judge (Dennis Miller at his snarkiest) isn't satisfied they've tried hard enough, so he sentences them to live together, as man and wife, for six months. The judge sets rules as well, so that it is to each's advantage to get the other to break them.

Thus the movie is a pas de deux, in which each tries to goad the other into subverting the marriage arrangement. In any event, the best thing about the fight is how unfairly each wages it and how the campaigns are based on the classical fault lines of boy-girl cohabitation. Some workplace chicanery comes into play, too.

The real pleasure in the film comes from the two stars, both of whom put vanity and narcissism far behind and are pleased to let the movie deploy them as less than noble, less than capable, less than smart, less than selfless and less than beautiful and, therefore, more than human.

-- Stephen Hunter (May 9, 2008)

Contains sexual situations and crude language, including a drug reference.