A new set of Griswolds take the holiday road in this new Vacation movie.
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| "Look!! Dad ruined his career and only ends up in crappy remakes now." |
There's a
reason why there are so many sequels and remakes and reboots nowadays. Okay, a reason besides presumably easy
money. That reason is nostalgia. Name recognition is meant to inspire good
memories of the original, and to take an opportunity to revisit the places and
things from the past that we love and make new memories there. Nostalgia is pretty powerful that way, and
it's the driving force, and more or less the plot, of Vacation, the
latest in a long line of remakes of beloved films of the past.
Ed Helms
steps into the role of Rusty Griswold (the fifth actor to do so in as many
movies), who is without a doubt his father's son: a well-meaning but often
misguided family man. The usual hijinks
ensue when he spontaneously decides to take his bored family on a cross country
trip like the one he remembered from his childhood; as disastrous as it may
have been, it at least brought his family closer together. If the trip was smooth sailing, there'd be no
movie.
The problem
with remakes and reboots is that they often have unrealistic expectations put
upon them. Granted, the original Vacation
was no Citizen Kane, but it's still a very fondly remembered
film. But it's not the expectations,
however high they may be, that hold this movie down. This Vacation falls mostly flat on its
own efforts. It follows the original
film's formula a bit too closely, struggling to maintain its genuine heart
while trying to mix in the over-the-top irreverence of modern R-rated comedies
like Ted and the underrated (and way superior) We're The Millers and
a dash of Jump Street self-awareness.
Vacation has a lot of balls in the air, and no matter how many
land the way they're supposed to, it's hard to ignore the ones that drop.
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| "When someone farts in the car, we all laugh." |
There are
actually a lot of solid laughs to be had in Vacation. Quite a lot of them come from the young
actor Steele Stebbins in a breakout performance as Rusty's youngest son
Kevin. Stebbins takes what could have
been a routine "bratty kid" role and hijacks every scene he appears
in, and injects the movie with a lot of much-needed hilarity when other jokes
fall flat around him. Some addition
spark comes from the numerous fun cameos that would have been distracting in
similar films but are refreshing and much needed here. (Unfortunately this does not include the
obligatory appearance by Clark Griswold himself, Chevy Chase, who just seems
awkward and a bit sad here.) These laughs
are almost enough to make up for Vacation's many missed opportunities,
but not quite.
No one
likely expected Vacation to be a great film, as a remake or even on its
own merits, but the film suffers greatly from missed opportunities and an
uneven success rate. The laugh-out-loud
moments just aren't enough to make it stand up to even the best recent
comedies, much less the series of films that preceded it. The bad just slightly outweighs the good of Vacation,
making for a rather uneven "holiday road".
SCORE
-Mike Stec
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