Today's Review: Vacation

Another review up!

Vacation - recensie

Well, that was positively awful. Of course, the current trend of making a comedy as raunchy as possible by cramming it full of dirty jokes involving excrements and unusual sexual positions has been going for quite a while now, so you can hardly blame this Vacation for that. It's not like the original movie refrained from such shenanigans. But the level of said gags is just abominably low here, making it painfully unfunny for the most part. Too bad, because I know the lead Ed Helms, of Hangover fame, is capable of funnier routines. But even he is hopelessly lost somewhere between the rim jobs and Chris Hemsworth's erection. You got a bad thing going when the holiday car is funnier that the characters driving it. But at least the car doesn't make poop jokes galore. This vehicle of Albanian make is just loaded with silly gadgets and awkward options. Not all of them a guarantee for success, but at least I chuckled over the navigation system's sultry female American voice accidentally being replaced by a seemingly outraged Korean counterpart. If translated however, it would no doubt be revealed to get in line with the rest of the ample obscenities the script contains.

As with most remakes these days, this one wouldn't have been missed if it wasn't produced at all. However, recycling the original film's plot and adding Horrible Bosses or We're the Millers type jokes to it likely saved the studio a few bucks. The story is mostly the same as its predecessor's, while some of the situations are even lifted verbatim from some of the other Vacation movies from the Eighties. It's not like this is that well known a franchise these days, so who would know, right? But if you acknowledge the status of this film as a remake by making jokes about that very fact in the actual film, you sure run the risk of people checking out the previous installments and finding out just how lazy the writing is this time around. Even such references to the original are hardly an inspired move. Remember 21 Jump Street addressing its status as a reboot by literally saying nobody at the top has any better ideas than just regurgitating old notions ad nauseam? It's a funny line, until you understand just how poignantly true it is. We don't need to hear the same argument here to hammer the point home. The movie is unhilarious enough without reminding us a better film with the same name and the same plot was produced thirty years ago. Or that we're likely to see another movie with said name and plot in a few more decades. The kids in this feature definitely appear stupid enough to make the same mistakes all over when they grow up.

Luckily, this Vacation will be swiftly forgotten. It'll prove a lot harder to get that obnoxiously catchy song Holiday Road out of our heads.

Today's Mini-Review: We're the Millers

We're the Millers: ***/*****, or 6/10

Typical formulaic Hollywood fare. You take a comedically intriguing premise, you drown it in cheap sex jokes and excessive swearing for swearing's sake, you add established funny actors for flavor to make sure audiences will get what they expect (in this case Jennifer Aniston and Jason Sudeikis: you didn't think they would be together in something other than a comedy, did you?!), and you garner the whole in moralistic messaging to ensure a predictably happy ending for everyone concerned. The end result in this case is We're the Millers, but you could have rightfully entered many comedy titles of the last decades in its place with these ingredients. We're the Millers isn't the worst of them though, since there's a number of good dirty jokes too (and a killer whale eating a shark for extra kicks). Small time drug dealer David (Sudeikis), a loner living a life totally devoid of responsibilities whatsoever, ends up owning a lot of money to his sleazy supplier (Ed Helms from the Hangover series, largely identical narrative territory). He can make up for it by smuggling a load of weed over the Mexican border though. To avoid getting caught, David decides to masquerade as a family unit on a holiday trip in an RV, together with a broke stripper (Aniston) who hates his guts but needs his money, an obnoxious female teen runaway and a socially awkward boy of eighteen that hasn't yet done the deed (and thus ends up being both the victim of the majority of this flick's crude jokes and getting a girlfriend). After having secured the shipment, this so-called Miller family heads for home, but unfortunately for them David's employer screwed over a Mexican drug lord in the whole transaction, who soon is in hot pursuit together with a grotesque, hulking one-eyed henchman. Plus, they also have to deal with tarantulas, corrupt Mexican officials fishing for sexual favors, agressive border patrols, an actual family on vacation suffering from a dent in their sex life, and of course, each other. However, to the surprise of all of them, they quickly discover the benefits of and acquire a taste for family life, as Hollywood's conformative, conservative propaganda machine is working overtime to make sure all's well that ends well. At least we get a decent amount of witty repartee and performances to match from a cast that is all too familiar with this genre and knows how to make it work, which could also translate as being on auto-pilot. And for those interested, Aniston's sexy dance routines are adequate enough to convince us she's playing a cheap stripper. But overall, We're the Millers proves an all too standard comedy that you'll stick with for 110 minutes and you'll forget about just as fast.