Game Night

Enough of the "bored" games, amirite?

Grade: B +

Director:  John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein

Starring: Jason Bateman, Rachel McAdams, Kyle Chandler, Jesse Plemons, Billy Magnussen, Sharon Horgan, Lamorne Morris, Kylie Bunbury, Jeffrey Wright, and Danny Huston

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 33 min.

Landing is that rare category of movies that are better than they have any logical reason being, Game Night is an early-year diversion that sneaks up on you. On (and yeah, below) the surface, it lands on the well-populated space of Jason Bateman comedies where he plays the snarky straight man opposite some form of inanity. I was going to reel off a few examples, but even a cursory list would eat up my review space—suffice it to say that directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein penned the screenplays for both of Bateman’s Horrible Bosses films. In truth, writer Mark Perez’s Game Night script is a snappier brand of silliness, presenting a cinematic exhibition in which the audience already knows the rules, yet the gameplay this time is surprisingly more entertaining.

Max (Bateman) and his wife Annie (Rachel McAdams) meet cute over an evening of intense bar trivia, but the carefree, ultra-competitive personalities that make them whizzes at charades have also (somehow) inhibited their advancement towards parenthood. Enter Brooks (Kyle Chandler), Max’s successful, devil-may-care older brother, who invites Max and Annie’s weekly game night coterie to his rental mansion for an elaborate murder mystery. Things go haywire when two ruffians nab Brooks, leaving Max, Annie, and their four friends floundering to win a contest that may or may not be real.

Movie buffs will enjoy innumerable references that start with overall premise itself, a takeoff on David Fincher’s “The Game.” There’s a recreated Pulp Fiction monologue, a running Denzel gag that’s actually key to one subplot, and copious cues to The Terminator, The Matrix, Ed Norton plus every other actor who played the Hulk, and a mashup of Eyes Wide Shut and Fight Club, another Fincher film. The abode of one creepy character contains avian taxidermy revealed with a Dutch angle, an homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

The movie subsists on three simple filmmaking elements: a snicker-a-second script that keeps the audience guessing just enough, complemented by game cast. Lamorne Morris and Kylie Bunbury play Kevin and Michelle, a lifelong couple suddenly rocked by the revelation that she once slept with a secret celebrity. Billy Magnussen plays Ryan, an affable doofus who invites an Irish workmate (Sharon Horgan) to the game as his ringer because, well, she sounds smart.

But besides Bateman, the real winners of this Game Night are three actors whose skills are particularly illuminated in this comedic setting, one in which the directors also give each the space to find their distinctive personas. Chandler plays the obnoxious Id to Batman’s backseat brother. Jesse Plemons is a revelation as a neighboring cop who’s wound way too tight since his divorce. And McAdams, so often pigeonholed as the supporting love interest, gets an equal spotlight with Bateman, and their comic alchemy carries the film.

Into a worthy season of Oscar hopefuls and a superhero movie turned cultural touchstone, Game Night arrives as a suitable date night, an enjoyable outing that’s somehow both smart and mindless. We could all use a little escapist comedy right now.

Vacation

Grade: C

Director:  John Francis Daley, Jonathan M. Goldstein

Starring: Ed Helms, Christina Applegate, Skyler Gisondo, Steele Stebbins, Leslie Mann, Chris Hemsworth and Charlie Day

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 39 min.

“I've never even heard of the original vacation,” says young Kevin Griswold on the eve of another misbegotten cross-country family foray in the sequel “Vacation.”

“Doesn't matter,” deadpans Rusty (Ed Helms), scion to Chevy Chase’s Clark Griswold. “The new vacation will stand on its own.”

Not exactly. Vacation is far removed from the original National Lampoon’s Vacation, the 1983 Harold Ramis farce that introduced the world to the Griswolds and their ill-fated misadventure to Walley World, the fictitious amusement park. The film echoed the frustrations of the Reagan-era middle-class and their proud but elusive attempts to realize the American dream.

The new Vacation is a retread as noxious as the Arkansas sewage pond that Rusty, wife Debbie (Christina Applegate), and sons James (Skyler Gisondo) and Kevin (Steele Stebbins) unwittingly wade into en route from Chicago for a return visit to Walley World.

Rusty, now grown into a veritable Clark clone, is a hapless airline pilot for an econo carrier with a stale love life and no respect from his sons. James is a literary-loving introvert, while the foul-mouthed Kevin concocts devious ways to torture his older brother.

So Rusty piles the family into a rented minivan bound for California—if you’re wondering why a commercial pilot couldn’t simply obtain discount tickets so his family could fly to Walley World, well, he can. But then we’d be deprived of such detours as Memphis, Tenn. (accurate U.S. geography not included) to revisit Debbie’s drunken sorority days back when she was known as “Debbie Do-Anything.” A whitewater ride in the Rockies goes awry thanks to a manic depressive guide (Charlie Day). And when Rusty stops to visit sister Audrey (Leslie Mann) and her blow-dried husband (Chris Hemsworth) in Texas, we’re treated to cannibal cows and Hemsworth’s 6-pack and sheathed tube steak.

Along the way, writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein revisit the hot blond in a convertible scene from the original Vacation just to wreck it. It’s an apt metaphor for this risible reprise, which is low on satire and high on gross-out gags, beginning literally seconds into the crude opening credits montage. And let me be clear: profane children are never funny.

Indeed, whenever you hear Lindsey Buckingham’s “Holiday Road,” or Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo pop up for a shot of nostalgia, it comes with a weariness that causes you to momentarily question your affinity for the original National Lampoon’s Vacation.

It’s a bad sign when the funniest character in a comedy is the car—even The Love Bug had Buddy Hackett. The Griswolds’ fictional “Tartan Prancer,” known as “the Honda of Albania,” is a comically inconvenient MPV that has outside cup holders, a CB radio, retractable powers cords designed for corkscrew-shaped outlets, and two fuel tanks with half the gas mileage. The incoherent key fob with a dozen buttons emblazoned with unhelpful symbols like a rabbit, rocket ship, muffin and swastika.

More of this updated, whip smart humor would have helped this Vacation actually stand on its own. Instead, this road trip hits a dead end.