Review: ‘Vacation’

Well they have been threatening to make this movie for years, so it was inevitable that it was about to happen whether we asked for it or not. “Vacation” picks up where the previous “National Lampoon’s Vacation” movies have left off, picking up and continuing the story of one of America’s most hapless families, this time getting into the not-so-great family life of the next generation of Griswolds.

When “Vegas Vacation” ended 17 years ago in that dark theater you were sitting in, did you immediately wonder what would it be like if Clark’s son Rusty grew up, had a shitty family, and went on his own family vacation? No, you didn’t? Well here you go anyway.

Rusty started out as skinny Anthony Michael Hall in 1983 and is now middle-aged Ed Helms. His oldest son James is a passive dork and a bit of a sensitive weirdo and his youngest son Kevin is a little foul mouthed shit with serious issued with giving respect. And his wife Debbie (the always delightful Christina Applegate) is bored with the marriage to the point of apathy. To get his family out of this rut, Rusty unilaterally decided to amend their summer vacation plans to a road trip from Illinois to California to visit the theme park Wally World a.k.a. the same road trip his dad Clark took his family on all those years ago. And of course things go wrong every step of the way because that’s the point of the movie even existing, to watch a family go through shit, sometimes literally, to get to where they need to be.

Like his dad, Rusty is sweet but very misguided and also pretty dumb, so he tries his best to keep a positive spin on everything but that’s much harder to do in this movie than it would be in the original film because the things that happen in this particular “Vacation” are much uglier and meaner this time around. If you were to watch this after watching the previous Griswold vacation movies, this one would stand out like a sore thumb because it is much more vile and vulgar than the prior installments. Everyone curses a lot, bodily functions and fluids of all sorts play prominently in a number of jokes, and many side characters are defined in strictly the worst terms ever, whether it be suicidal or narcissistic or immature or rapey. Rusty Griswold is actually swimming in a sea of assholes and he’s trying his best not to get their shit all over him (and failing at that both figuratively and literally).

But is this meaner, more cynical comedy any good? Since this is comedy, that depends on whether or not you think this kind of stuff is funny. If we were to compare this type of movie to television comedies, it would be as if the other Griswold vacation movie are more like episodes of “Friends” or “The Big Bang Theory,” you know, good for the whole family, whereas this “Vacation” is much more like “Family Guy” or almost anything on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block of programming, where gross out gags and purposefully offensive humor is the name of the game. So this kind of comedy definitely has its place and surely feels “of this time” and more modern and contemporary, but that doesn’t necessarily make it all work. There are a handful of gags and jokes that did make me laugh out loud and I did find a good portion of the movie amusing, but I would be hard pressed to actually recommend this film to anyone. Unless you REALLY want to see Christina Applegate vomit a lot in one scene, in which case, this is indeed the movie for you.

This is also the kind of movie that attempts to do its own thing while simultaneously throwing it back to the original, with many overt references to the 1983 film, but really that stuff only serves to make me want to rewatch the original and enjoy Chevy Chase’s oblivious jerk routine. And Chase pops up for a couple of scenes in this film and it is…kind of hard to watch. His signature physical comedy just doesn’t work like it used to, and his jerky behavior on screen now only serves to bring to the mind the many stories of his real life jerkiness on television and movie sets.

At least there is a semblance of “trying” with this movie, as if the writer/directors actually gave a shit about it being good. They nailed the road trip aspect of the movie, showing off the different locations and really driving home the whole “seeing America” thing that doesn’t get done in movies enough anymore, and there is a story throughline about Rusty trying to help his kids and save his marriage that plays out all the way through the end, which means that when they wrote this thing, at least they thought of a real emotional hook to center everything on, so that even while there are gross jokes happening all around, at least the middle of this movie, the real meat of it, is actually about something, and that is commendable.

But in contrast to that, there are also a ton of jokes that are non-sequiturs, often coming out of nowhere and then not playing into anything that comes later. There’s a whole subplot thing about the oldest son falling for a girl he meets on the road, but after a few scenes this storyline just stops, weirdly right at a moment that would be played up for real dramatics in any other movie (i.e. a person taking a brand new friendship way too far way too fast on the internet in the form of a Facebook “in a relationship” status update). And the subplot about the younger brother bullying the older brother has a quick resolution about three-fourths of the way through the movie and then ends abruptly, as if the writers/directors were tired of the joke and decided to just stop it. There’s even a pretty great joke about how state police would handle an incident at the Four Corners Monument but it feels more like someone inserted an SNL or Funny or Die bit into this movie and never found a way to really make it connect to anything else, so its just there as a joke that goes on for minutes on end and then goes away, never to be mentioned or referenced again. Stuff like that happens kind of often in this movie.

It’s not like all the National Lampoon’s Vacation movies are all winners and this new “Vacation” is shitting on some sort of sacred legacy, but it really isn’t good enough to defend or recommend or revisit. It just exists, now another lackluster installment in a series of movies which has existed far longer than anyone expected back in the early 80’s when the first movie came out. The quality of this particular movie depends on your preference of comedic stylings, and really that is it.