Vacation
Directors: John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldestein
(In theaters)
B
Without having the National Lampoon name affixed to it, the 2015 Vacation has its cake and eats it, too, serving as both remake and reboot. Whether it’s as successful as the ’83 original is almost beside the point. That Chevy Chase vehicle is a true comedy classic; to try to top it would be futile, so Horrible Bosses screenwriters-turned-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein don’t. They simply aim to be funny.
Chase’s bumbling, well-meaning patriarch, Clark W. Griswold, drove all four previous Vacations. This time, son Rusty graduates to man the wheel. All grown up, Rusty (The Hangover trilogy’s Ed Helms, again doing the Ed Helms character, which he does well) is a pilot with a budget airline who, like his father, just wants to spend more time with his wife, Debbie (Anchorman’s Christina Applegate, filling the Beverly D’Angelo spousal role with aplomb), and their two ever-warring sons (The Amazing Spider-Man’s Skyler Gisondo and A Haunted House 2’s Steele Stebbins). Overhearing Debbie complain of dreading yet another annual trek to a cabin, Rusty decides to revisit his most memorable trip as a child: going from Chicago to California’s Walley World theme park.
So with an Albanian Tartan Prancer subbing for the ol’ Wagon Queen Family Truckster, Rusty and fam head west, stopping in Texas to see Rusty’s sister, Audrey (Leslie Mann, The Change-Up), and her too-perfect husband (Thor himself, Chris Hemsworth). Also on the agenda, intended or not: vehicular pursuits, near-fatal white-water rafting, definitely fatal cow herding, Seal sing-alongs, sexual high jinks, suspect motels, much puke. Like father, like son.
The result is funnier and more satisfying than any of the sequels, America’s perennial Christmas favorite included. That said, one wishes Daley and Goldstein had tightened the screws on this ball, since many scenes could exist as stand-alone sketches vs. being part of a through line. They tackle the beats of the original without gluing them into a unified whole. When Clark Griswold flipped the eff out in the original, it rang true as an eventual point on the story arc; when Rusty does the same here, the effect is lost because it feels as if a box is being checked rather than a scene receiving proper setup. So fractured is the film, I suspect the editor’s desktop trash can houses several gigabytes of excised scenes.
Still, I laughed, and a lot. From the opening strains of Lindsey Buckingham’s still-catchy “Holiday Road” theme, I immediately felt nostalgic, which Daley and Goldstein not only intended, but manufactured, given their movie’s surplus of callbacks to Harold Ramis’ playfully ribald original. (The depression caused by a late subplot may not have been on purpose.) The jokes of the ’15 Vacation may spring from a meaner place — witness the new version of the iconic Christie Brinkley gag, for instance — but they tend to make their marks, often enough that Chase’s own (sad) cameo in the third act is entirely unnecessary.
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This random movie review escaped from the archives of Flick Attack.
