Holiday Rohhh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oad.
Yup. I wasted valuable time and money to take in this movie.
OBLIGATORY SPOILER WARNING – though the trailer pretty much summarizes the best parts of the film:
Movieclips Trailers – Vacation
Oh Hollywood. Why must you continue to play it safe with reboots and sequels and so on?
Let me put it this way:
1) This movie doesn’t suck.
2) It only starts to suck when you start comparing it to the three original Vacation movies from the 1980’s that share this film’s name.
3) Though I can’t call it a guffaw-fest, there were a number of times where I did laugh.
The setup: Adult Rusty Griswold (Ed Helms), recognizing that his family is stuck in an unhappy rut, decides to pack up the clan and take them on a road trip to Walley World, just as his father Clark (Chevy Chase) did in the first film.
From there on, the film becomes a series of sketches, smaller vignettes that happen the family as they make various stops along the way.
Some jokes from the first movie are parodied or paid homage to (Rusty rents a Prancer, an Albanian car that far surpasses his father’s Family Truckster in suckage).
But to the movie’s credit, it pokes fun at itself, and an attempt is made to go off on its own rather than be simply a modernized carbon copy of the original.
Cameos aplenty, as I assume many of today’s actors have fond memories of laughing their butts off at a young Chevy Chase, as I do.
Chevy and Beverly D’Angelo make cameos as Grandpa Clark and Grandma Ellen. I feel like there might have been potential to do something funnier with them, but then again, had they been featured longer than they were, it’d of been a different movie altogether.
For fans of Community, it might be hard to not look at Chevy these days and think “Pierce Hawthorne.” Meanwhile, Beverly has definitely made some kind of supernatural anti-aging deal.
My favorite bit was the younger brother bullies the older brother routine. Every once in awhile, I’ll see that somewhere. It’s usually the older kid, who’s bigger, bullies the younger kid, but every so often you’ll see an older kid who’s polite and doesn’t want to hurt his miserable pipsqueak of a younger brother, even though he could totally knock him into next week for being a little jerk if he wanted to. That dynamic makes for some fun here.
As if there wasn’t enough in this film to make me feel old, Christina Applegate, who once played the uber hot Kelly Bundy in her youth (and who I oggled extensively in mine), now plays the uptight Mom trying to prove to everyone she’s still as fun as she used to be.
Oh time, please slow down.
Should you rush out to see it? Nah. Is it worth a rental when you have nothing better to do? Sure.
STATUS: Not shelf-worthy.
BUT – if you’re one of those younger people born with a cell phone in hand, you should check out:
Vacation
European Vacation
Christmas Vacation (I don’t know about you but I have to watch this at least once during the holiday season)
And though it’s not as good, Vegas Vacation.
Bookshelf Battle 