Vacation

Vacation is the latest remake / reboot / sequel (it doesn’t really matter anymore) of a 1980s classic.  The original National Lampoon’s Vacation—starring Chevy Chase, written by John Hughes, and directed by Harold Ramis—came out in 1983 and still stands as one of the funniest R-rated family comedies of all time. What made that film so good was its emotional connection to real life. Chase’s Clark Griswold was a mildly exaggerated version of the typical white suburban dad who tried way too hard to make his family love him. The film followed the classic road movie structure with the tension and comic possibilities slowly building at each stop along the way.

For this new version, Ed Helms (of The Hangover trilogy and The Office sitcom) plays a grown-up Rusty Griswold—the character of Chase’s son, originated by Anthony Michael Hall and played by a different actor in each of the previous four sequels. The movie starts out promisingly, with an amusing title sequence set to the jaunty song that kicked off the ’83 picture, “Holiday Road” by Lindsey Buckingham.  Helms’ Rusty is a credible descendent of Chase’s distinctive comedic style, but Helms keeps the embarrassment his character should feel in most situations at a pronounced distance.  As a result, he lacks the underlying quality of pain and sadness that made Clark Griswold the most memorable and sympathetic film performance of Chase’s career.

The rest of the family is set up well. Christina Applegate holds her own as Rusty’s homemaker wife with a wild and crazy past. They have two sons, a goofily sensitive teenager (Skyler Gisondo) and a trash-talking tween (Steele Stebbins). The dynamic of a big brother who is mercilessly and relentlessly bullied by his pipsqueak little brother is a fresh dynamic for a dysfunctional family comedy.  Unfortunately, like all the running gags in this road picture, it becomes tiresomely repetitive around the midpoint.  Joke after joke begins to fall flat as the family makes its way to their destination, the theme park Wally World. 

Writers Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (Horrible Bosses, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone) make their directorial début with this feature and, while they come up with some inventive gags, they constantly fall back into predictable dick and poop jokes and the type of exaggerated farce that severs any emotional connection to the family we might feel.  Unlike the original Vacation, we’re always laughing at this family, never identifying with them.

This remake totally runs out of gas by the time we get to the obligatory cameos from the original movie’s stars. Seeing the fat, bald Chase stumble through the lame pratfalls the filmmakers devise for him is just sad, especially if you remember when he was a master of physical comedy. But even worse is that the gifted comedian Beverly D’Angelo, who played Chase’s wife Ellen in all four previous Vacation pictures, is not given a SINGLE funny line or bit of comic business. Goldstein and Daley might as well have placed a cardboard cutout of Ellen Griswold in her place (sadly, her once beautiful face has been so altered by plastic surgery that it almost feels like they did.)

I’m sure the forces behind rebooting Vacation want it to blossom into the lucrative franchise the original movie inspired, but it’s hard to picture anyone getting very excited to see these characters in even one more wacky adventure.