I really don’t want to waste anymore time on this than is necessary. Vacation, written and directed by Horrible Bosses and The Incredible Burt Wonderstone scribes John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein, is a rebooted sequel to the original 1983 comedy National Lampoon’s Vacation. It uses self-awareness as a defense mechanism and feces as its punchlines, which is to say it knows it’s swimming in gutter humor and doing a poor job at it, but hopes you’ll excuse it out of nostalgia for the original and compassion for what it feels it’s up against. Hmmmm, best of luck to those that don’t even know the original exists.
How do you follow up a franchise of films that still stand tall more than 30 years after the original hit theaters? Well, having the family at the center of it all swim in sewage and attempt to clean out a bathtub that looks like a crime scene with a wad of pubic hair isn’t the answer. In fact, for the most part it’s pointless to compare this half-hearted attempt at a sequel to the original, but in one respect I must.
The original Vacation, same as this one, featured the Griswold family on a cross-country family road trip to the Walley World amusement park. The journey was fraught with stumbling blocks and Chevy Chase as the Griswold patriarch was just as dumb as he was big-hearted. In this reboot, Ed Helms steps into the lead role as Rusty, son to the Griswold idiot legacy, and his family is in a rut and he’s determined to bond with them on their own cross-country trip to Walley World. He rents a car made by and for morons (because, JOKES!) and his family begrudgingly joins him on a trip that should have ended before it began.
Rusty is joined by his wife, Debbie (Christina Applegate), and two sons, James and Kevin (Skyler Gisondo and Steele Stebbins). James is a goody-goody and Kevin is a foul-mouthed ass meant to provide comic relief by picking on his brother and shouting expletives. Actually, now that I think about it, he may actually be suffering from Tourette’s, in which case forget I ever called him an ass. Quietly moving on…
Along with swimming in sewage and staying in a hotel still in business most likely thanks to serial killers and truck stop hookers, a side-trip to visit Rusty’s sister (Leslie Mann) and her husband (Chris Hemsworth in the only truly comical role in the film), a threatening trucker (Norman Reedus), a rival family led by Ron Livingston, a ridiculous water rafting trip and a “should have been deleted scene” at the Four Corners Monument along with countless half-assed callbacks to the original all make up a film where you might find a few chuckles (and a few more if you’ve somehow avoided all the trailers), but will most likely be waiting for it all to end.
At one point Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo show up, serving more as a reminder of what once was as neither one of them even resemble who they once were. Even a silly moment when Chase clumsily grabs a guitar out of a closet falls flat even though you begin to think it may have actually elicited a laugh had it been in a better movie. That’s where I really began to realize where this movie went wrong.
The original Vacation films weren’t this nasty or mean-spirited. There was an innocence to them all, a sense of family and a feeling of “let’s make the most of it” from pretty much all involved and even a bit of sadness and compassion when it was obvious nothing was going right. Here, it’s quite obvious none of these people wanted to be here except for Rusty, and that’s only because he’s too stupid to notice anything that’s going on around him. There’s no resemblance to the films this movie attempts to homage and therefore even the homages fall flat and for audiences that have no idea what the original Vacation even was they are truly going to be left with blank stares as the stupidity unfolds.
Vacation is rated R, but the humor is targeting a 13-and-under audience, an audience wholly unaware the original even exists, but at the very least it may have enough poop references for them to get a few laughs. In fact, that audience may be laughing at the fact I just wrote the word “poop” and to them, I say, “Have at it!” As for me, no thanks.
