Broad
City and Time Traveling
Bong sitcom co-creator and frequent writer-producer-director Lucia Aniello
makes her big screen debut in the director’s chair with the screwball dark
comedy Rough Night.
Aided by her co-producer, writer, business partner and star Paul W. Downs, the film stars Scarlett Johansson, Kate McKinnon, Jillian Bell, Ilana Glazer and Zoe Kravitz as five friends who after a ten-year hiatus reunite for a bachelorette party weekend in Miami, Florida. After a long night of boozing, marijuana and cocaine, the gang hires a male stripper who in the throes of hard partying accidentally kill him.
Aided by her co-producer, writer, business partner and star Paul W. Downs, the film stars Scarlett Johansson, Kate McKinnon, Jillian Bell, Ilana Glazer and Zoe Kravitz as five friends who after a ten-year hiatus reunite for a bachelorette party weekend in Miami, Florida. After a long night of boozing, marijuana and cocaine, the gang hires a male stripper who in the throes of hard partying accidentally kill him.
Think Peter Berg’s Very Bad Things with the aesthetic and
comic sensibilities of your typical Paul Feig romcom and even room to rip jokes
off Weekend at Bernie’s, the film is
part raunchy sex and partying comedy/part darkly comic thriller as the girls
frantically try to cover their tracks.
Unlike Berg’s film, however, this Sony Pictures comedy is more or less a
kinder-gentler The Hangover with
plenty of attitude and off-color humor but a fraction of either of the
aforementioned films’ edginess.
Boasting Johansson and Bell
as the film’s most overqualified cast members and an electronic soundtrack by
Skrillex and Nicolas Winding Refn regular Cliff Martinez, Rough Night is mostly a lot of stuff we’ve seen many times over
already with some occasionally funny but mostly tiresome gags. Bell is funny as always, picking up where she
left off with her neurotic and foul mouthed teacher in Fist Fight but McKinnon does yet another riff on Holtzmann from
Feig’s Ghostbusters reboot because,
hey, what didn’t work there might work here?
It’s a grating and often unfunny performance which sadly undermines the talents
of Johansson and Bell. Paul W. Downs as
the fiancé does his best to add a drunk and stoned knight-in-shining-armor
subplot to the proceedings which plays even heavier on the men-in-underwear gag
than Iñárritu’s Birdman
did.
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| Getting ready to make some wild porn!!! |
Though many still have less
than kind things to say about Very Bad
Things and other like-minded hiding dead body comedies, part of the hook
that film had was the swiftness with which it offed characters in abrupt and increasingly
shocking ways. Not unlike the television
shows Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead, no one was safe and
everyone could die a horrific death at any moment, but with Rough Night, that overarching tension played for awkward and discomfiting laughter isn’t anywhere to be seen or felt.
Despite a couple attempts at uncomfortable dark humor involving the
girls’ unwanted cadaver on their hands and some goofy sexual encounters along the way, Rough
Night comes off as an oddly safe and forgettable romcom and therefore becomes tedious as we’re
taken through every bridesmaid romantic comedy cliché in the book.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki