Vacation Review

Vacation
Marriage in crisis, rusty griswold (helms) drags the wife and kids on a summer road trip to walley world.

by Simon Creek |
Published on
Release Date:

20 Aug 2015

Running Time:

99 minutes

Certificate:

15

Original Title:

Vacation

Over the course of four features, Chevy Chase’s mutant nuclear family have become such a pop-culture brand, they’re the only movie clan alongside the Flintstones to feature in Microsoft Word’s spellcheck. With Ed Helm and Christina Applegate headlining, a next-generation reboot seems to make sense, but this comes perilously close to rehash.

As is road-trip tradition, Chase’s original pilgrimage was allegorical that voyage to Walley World was essentially a man driving head-first into a midlife crisis. Helm’s inept Rusty suggests the torch has been passed to the right buffoon, but in Vacation, it’s Applegate in meltdown mode, sparked by an unwise stop-off at her old college. If there’s a reason to catch Vacation it’s the sweet-and-sour Applegate, but even so. Road movies are episodic by design, so Vacation was always going to be sketchy. What’s surprising is the indecisive tone, swerving between farce, gross-out, Apatow gender-com and Farrelly splatstick.

Every memorable film comedy has a stand-out gag. Vacation has its moments but it never delivers that killer, word-of-mouth set-piece. The closest the movie comes to a signature gag is the Griswolds’ terrifically horrific Albanian holiday car, the Tartan Prancer — designed with such handy extras as angry Korean sat-nav and a bewildering keyfob with a swastika button.

It soon becomes apparent the Prancer is an emblem of the Griswolds’ deteriorating state — battered, pranged and, eventually, self-exploding. And yet the malfunctioning motor also characterises the movie itself — midway through, the exhaust backfires and the gags run out of gas.

One unexpected pleasure: Chris Hemsworth as the Griswolds’ brother-in-law, so ridiculously alpha he’s endowed with an oil-rig in his trousers.

Less a reboot, more a hit-and-miss cover-version. The cast are game, Applegate especially, but the laughs flatten like a deflated tyre.
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