Anyone who’s been following me over the past couple years (all, what, two or three of you?) likely knows that I have officially declared comedy to be dead. Now, sure, there have been some damn funny movies since said declaration, but those have been more drama stories that happen to have heavily comedic elements in them (see The Big Sick and Gifted, for examples). Straight-up comedies, meanwhile, have stagnated like long-festering corpses, their rigor mortis our only visual scraps.
If I’m gonna be honest, I went into Game Night expected to be as bemused as I have been so many times recently, especially given that a few jokes are over-explained and stretched out in the damn trailer, no less! What I got was not this same sense of bemusement.
I got something worse: boredom.
The plot here is basically a riff on The Game, wherein a seemingly successful man returns to his brother’s life, the latter man stuck in something of a rut of game nights with his wife and friends, and hosts an ostensibly fake kidnapping mystery game in the same vein as Fincher’s underrated classic. Things take a turn, though, when it seems that the game is no game, but actual events taking place.
If nothing else, I kinda dig the premise, but directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, formerly of the absolutely atrocious Vacation reboot a couple years ago, have no idea what to do with it. Thankfully moving far from the torturous “humor” of their previous dud (I credit this to writer Mark Perez, whose less-than-stellar resume includes Herbie: Fully Loaded, Accepted, and The Country Bears, all lame but harmless), the duo instead cannot decide on a tone for this picture, oscillating between dully droll jokes and situations and ostensibly intense action sequences. Several jokes are made into runners for some reason (the debate over one couple’s years-ago infidelity is particularly out-of-place and exhausting by even the second mention of it), characters are given a single personality trait (if they’re lucky), and consequences alternate between mattering and not depending on how the script feels at that particular moment. Seriously, an entire scene, complete with explained jokes and dragged-out schtick, is devoted to the removal of a bullet accidentally fired into Jason Bateman’s arm (you may remember this one from the trailer), but this wound is barely mentioned again, save for another dragged-out bit involving a dog and a pathetic multiply-referenced joke during the climax. Are we to care? Are we supposed to take things as cartoonish or as real? If the film doesn’t know, neither can we, and thus any action is basically meaningless.
The cast is just as disinterested as the rest of us, with Bateman barely trying, Rachel McAdams overdoing things, and everyone else rightfully sleepwalking through the proceedings. Interestingly enough, cameos from Danny Huston and Michael C. Hall, a pair of actors I’ve often taken umbrage with due to their tendencies toward hamminess, are fairly restrained, though that’s likely more due to the fact that they’re barely even in the film than to any kind of effort on their parts. The camera work seems to be trying to evoke action thrillers like Taken and Drive, but sadly only succeeds in looking bland and flat. The music also hearkens back to Drive, fitting considering that film’s composer, Cliff Martinez, is handling the music here as well, but this time out it comes across like a limp synthstorm, an array of keyboard demo tunes that don’t bring any feelings to the proceedings at all.
Overall, this is just a lame, boring lump of a film. I stand by my declaration of comedy’s unfortunate demise, but at least this one wasn’t as painfully annoying as many of its ilk have been in recent years. If the plot sounds intriguing, or if the cast moves you, I’d wait to rent this thing in the comfort of your own home, ’cause it sure as hell ain’t worth the box office prices. Now, once I stop yawning, I’m gonna pop something actually funny into my player, maybe Trading Places or The Producers, I dunno yet…
Allusions of Grandeur 