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.

The Other Woman

We can make it through this movie,

if we just stick together.

Grade: C –

Director: Nick Cassavetes

Starring: Cameron Diaz, Leslie Mann, Kate Upton, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Don Johnson, Taylor Kinney and Nicki Minaj

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 49 min.

Buttressing once again the axiom that the apple often does fall far from the tree, director Nick Cassavetes (son of John Cassavetes, a pioneer of American independent filmmaking) somehow conceives a movie exalting female empowerment that actually furthers the opposite aims with The Other Woman.

Want to conjure sympathy for the wife of a cheating husband? Don’t make her a grating, borderline psychopath. Want to conjure sympathy for the unwitting mistress who feels equally used by this two-timer? Don’t make her a prickly urbanite who is callous toward the feelings of the aggrieved spouse just because the mistress was, in fact, unwitting. Want to make a character played by Kate Upton into a three-dimensional person? Don’t make repeated blonde dumbbell jokes and refer to her at one point as ‘The Boobs.’ Thankfully, Upton’s vacuous acting is barely noticeable when juxtaposed against the rest of this pervasively poor film—good for her, bad for the rest of us.

Carly Whitten (Cameron Diaz) is a leggy, fashion-conscious, Columbia-educated Manhattan lawyer (right…) with an assistant who looks, talks and dresses like Nicki Minaj (Nicki Minaj). Carly also has Mark (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), the boyfriend of her dreams until the night Carly dresses like a sexy plumber to surprise Mark at his Connecticut home, only to have Kate (Leslie Mann), Mark’s wife, answer the door. Carly scampers away, content to chalk this up as another bad romantic episode in her life and never see Mark or Kate ever again (though, Carly apparently keeps Mark in her phone contacts list since his name continues popping up every time he calls or texts her the rest of the film). However, Kate melts down and, her mascara perpetually smeared, tracks Carly down to her job and apartment. Her purpose isn’t angry confrontation, but instead some badly enunciated notion of connecting with her husband via getting repeatedly drunk with his erstwhile mistress.

Anyone suffering from Leslie Mann overload from just her Judd Apatow offerings should know that The Other Woman is pure, uncut Mann in all her uneven, hit-and-miss zaniness. For every gag that works, there are a baker’s dozen that fall flat and last way too long.

As Kate and Carly embark on a college-appropriate revenge plot involving Nair in the shampoo bottle, laxative in the whiskey and estrogen in the morning smoothie, they discover that Mark has moved on to Amber (Upton), a younger, curvier edition. That leads to some admittedly amusing moments when Carly realizes that she has become not just the other woman, but also the older one.

The three would-be foes join forces to prolong the plot and exact inevitable comeuppance. But with Cassavetes falling back on endless pratfalls and other sight gags like Mann peeing in an open bathroom (her go-to move) and a scatological bathroom sendup involving Mark more befitting a Farrelly brothers farce, the only thing more insulting than the single-cell humor are the clumsy attempts as “meaning” and “emotion.” A maudlin montage involving Kate tossing her wedding ring into the ocean and all three woman cozying together on the beach feels like it was lifted from an entirely different (albeit equally bad) movie.

There’s discernable chemistry between Mann and Diaz that would work well outside this unholy mélange of 9 to 5, The First Wives Club, and John Tucker Must Die, scrubbed of any residual wit, charm and purpose. Forget The Other Woman—this duo needs other material.

This is 40

The humor is as out-of-date as your shirt

Grade: C -
Director: Judd Apatow
Starring: Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann, Megan Fox, Albert Brooks, John Lithgow, Jason Segel, Charlyne Yi, Melissa McCarthy and Chris O’Dowd
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 2 hr. 14 min.

With only the strained sinew of pop culture binding its skeletal structure into any recognizable form, This is 40 fits nicely within a holiday season full vapid gatherings populated by mildly familiar acquaintances you’d really rather not have to hang around. It’s the maladjusted product of a director and his actress wife who would continue to cast their blood moppets and then ask both they and the actors around them to hurl profane invectives for well over two hours. And it’s a comedy whose notion of timely gags involve Viagra, the final season of Lost, and a reunion of Graham Parker and The Rumor, which coincides not-so-coincidentally with the release of their new “comeback” album.

The main selling point for This is 40 is that it follows the continuing domestic disquietude of the more irksome couple from writer-director Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up. When last we saw them, Pete (Paul Rudd, still playing Paul Rudd) was tripping on shrooms and Debbie (Leslie Mann) was getting dressed down by Seth Rogen in a hospital waiting room. Five years later, Pete and Debbie are still a quarreling, neurotic mess, aggravated by the sort of dire money troubles that allow folks to buy big a house, start a record company, run a side business, own an original doodle drawn by John Lennon and funnel over $10,000 to your father.

What’s most maddening is that This is 40 is more a series of scenes than a cohesive whole. Set during the week when both Pete and Debbie turn 40, Apatow jumps from one vignette to another, whether it’s far-less-funny reprise of Debbie going clubbing or Pete combatting a hemorrhoid. For intrigue, decide which is more offensive: Debbie threatening to physically harm a youngster who dared issue some benign insult about her daughter on Facebook, or deeming that the employee embezzling money from Debbie’s clothing boutique isn’t the hip, voluptuous Megan Fox but rather the Asian girl who looks and talks funny.

The inclusion of Albert Brooks and John Lithgow as Pete and Debbie’s dads, respectively, at least breaks up the stagnation. Still, Apatow makes Larry (Brooks) a mooch lacking social graces or much in the way of dignity. And while Debbie wants to mend fences with Oliver (Lithgow), her estranged biological father, five minutes in her presence gives you some idea why daddy might have stayed away all those years.

Ultimately, nothing of substance really happens in This is 40, which is overlong by at least the same number of minutes. There’s little empathy for a couple already intolerable in short spurts five years ago. If there’s more than a modicum here that rings true about your own life, seek immediate marriage counseling.

The Change-Up

Call Child Protective Services ASAP!

Grade: F

Director: David Dobkin

Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Justin Bateman, Leslie Mann, Olivia Wilde, and Alan Arkin

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 52 min.

During the opening minutes of The Change-Up, a baby projectile poops into his dad’s mouth. It’s the most telling scene in this revolting rehash, which apparently believes that a familiar formula becomes instantly edgy simply by smearing it with figurative (and sometimes literal) excrement.

The “body switcheroo” movie has been done (1940’s Turnabout) and done (Like Father, Like Son) and done (18 Again!) and done (Vice Versa) and done (Freaky Friday). The only discernable changes brought by The Change-Up are that the swap occurs between best bro buddies and the comedy is the hard-R variety.

Dave (Justin Bateman) is a ladder-climbing lawyer, husband and father of three who is weary of his pressure-cooker job and domesticated life. His friend, a profane, pothead lout named Mitch (Ryan Reynolds), is also a struggling actor living in a filthy bachelor pad who quit school plus pretty much everything he ever tried.

During a drunken night out, Dave and Mitch proclaim in unison that they wish they had the other’s life whilst urinating into a magical public fountain…you know, that old yarn. Presto chango, the next morning they awaken to the discovery that they have switched bodies.

Bateman and Reynolds are reliable comedic actors who cleverly portray two distinct characters. However, their performances are as creative as this tired gimmick gets. The rest of the film is an endless array of scatology and profanity foisted without wit or purpose, including when Dave’s booty call turns out to be a gravid nympho (Mircea Monroe), a startling number of race/religion-based wisecracks, and director David Dobkin’s predilection for showing as many characters using the toilet as possible.

A late stab at sappy sentimentality feels phony because writers Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (The Hangover) spend most of the film hurling hostility towards the very values they eventually try to prop up. Dave and Mitch don’t want to live each other’s lives until they decide they do, which only lasts until they decide they don’t again. In the meantime, Mitch abandons his desire to shag his best friend’s wife (Leslie Mann, natch) after witnessing her bout with diarrhea, while Dave declines to hookup with his gorgeous, sports & tattoo-loving secretary Sabrina (Olivia Wilde) only after going on two all-night dates and getting her naked.

At one point, Dave (as Mitch) finds himself trapped on the set of a lorno (light porn), forced by its demanding director to simulate sex with a busty, aging actress and a middle-aged lecher. The shame and disgust Dave feels can’t be much different than the cast of The Change-Up, or its audience.

Neil Morris