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Fortunately, Ed Helms is not on vacation here
CAlbert Einstein supposedly defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” By that token, John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein are certifiably insane, because they tell the same tasteless, unfunny jokes in Vacation, which they wrote and directed, over and over, sometimes in the very next line of dialogue, and somehow think these jokes will eventually become funny.
Vacation is a sequel or reboot of sorts of 1983’s National Lampoon’s Vacation, the saga of Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase) and his family, on a vacation from Hell. It’s now the present day, and Clark’s son Rusty (Ed Helms), who has fond memories of the original trip, wants to take his own family on a similar bonding trip. As in the original, Rusty, wife Debbie (Christina Applegate) head to fabled amusement park Walley World in Los Angeles, but this time around, instead of Cousin Eddie, they encounter toxic waste dumps, drunken sorority sisters, motels that not even roaches would inhabit, a demented white water rafting guide (Charlie Day), a possibly demented trucker, interrupted sexual encounters, and a ridiculously well-endowed brother-in-law (Chris Hemsworth).
National Lampoon’s Vacation was written by John Hughes and directed by Harold Ramis. In their place, we get the guys who wrote Horrible Bosses. The new movie has its fair share of exceedingly crude but often funny jokes, but it has just as many that simply fall flat. To make matters worse, Daley and Goldstein don’t seem to know when enough is enough, repeating those same bad jokes over and over. A prime example occurs about ten minutes into the movie (in the scene shown below), when Rusty’s younger son Kevin (Steele Stebbins) refers to his older brother James (Skyler Gisondo) as a “vagina.” By the time the scene is over, every member of the family has “accidentally” called James the same thing about a dozen times. And, as that scene indicates, the movie is more mean-spirited than the original as well, with Ed Helms’s cluelessness considerably less endearing than Chevy Chase’s was. Travel misadventures and dysfunctional families will always be good for laughs, as Vacation demonstrates on several occasions, but they’re much funnier when someone when related by someone who knows how, and how often, to tell a joke.
Continue reading on Vacation: Mini-review
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