“Vacation Friends” is the kind of comedy that is best viewed in small doses.

The film takes a rather familiar premise and starts promising before stretching that one joke way too thin, resulting in a film where the laughs slowly fade despite the talented cast’s hard work.

In “Vacation Friends,” Lil Rel Howery and Yvonne Orji play Marcus and Emily, a straight-laced couple on a getaway to a fancy resort in Mexico where Marcus is going to ask Emily to marry him.

But the proposal plan goes awry thanks to another couple at the resort, Ron (John Cena) and Kyla (Meredith Hagner). They are everything Marcus and Emily aren’t, free-spirited, care-free and a bit dangerous.

Still Marcus and Emily strike a friendship with Ron and Kyla during the vacation before returning to their mundane lives.

A few months later, Ron and Kyla show up at Marcus and Emily’s home, wrecking havoc in every way imaginable.

“Vacation Friends” starts strong with the initial meeting and the vacation hijinks providing some of the film’s biggest laughs. The four leads play off one another well, with Hagner a pleasant surprise and Howery and Cena showing some impressive comic chemistry.

But once the film leaves the resort, the laughs mostly disappear as “Vacation Friends” follows a formula used in everything from the John Belushi-Dan Aykroyd comedy “Neighbors” to “Couples Retreat” and pretty much any Christmas movie where someone crashes the family festivities.

It starts to feel like a film that has seen several incarnations, which is actually what has happened with this project. It bounced around for almost a decade, with Nicholas Cage, Will Smith, Ice Cube, Mark Wahlberg, Chris Pratt and Anna Faris all attached at one point.

The script, credited to five writers including director Clay Tarver, plays like a screenplay that was re-written several times, with Tarver’s direction lacking the proper pacing for the audience to sustain interest.

It really is a credit to the four leads that the film manages to not become a complete disaster. Cena has as much fun here as he did in “The Suicide Squad,” with Howry also building off his fun work in “Free Guy” and Hagner managing to steal scenes from the male leads quite easily.

All three, as well as Orji, deserved a better script that played to their abilities, not a watered-down version that clearly was passed from studio to studio before finally opting to skip a theatrical release and go straight to streaming.

Yes, you could do a lot worse than “Vacation Friends,” but you can also do way better.

Starring: Lil Rey Howry, John Cena

Directed by: Clay Tarver

Rating: R for crude sexual reference, language throughout and drug content

Playing at: Available for streaming on Hulu

Grade: C-