Forget what the critics say (27% on Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB Metascore 34/100). If you like the National Lampoon’s Vacation movies, I think you’ll enjoy the Ed Helms (The Hangover, television’s The Office) led Vacation. It follows the same formula as the other movies in the series, and it has Ed Helms! Ed Helms is one of the funniest men in Hollywood! He took his bit part in the middle half of The Office and made it impossible for the writers not to keep him. With respect to Rainn Wilson, John Krasinski, and Jenna Fischer, The Office became Ed Helms’ show once Steve Carell exited. Even when his movies miss (The Hangover Part III, The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard), it’s not because of him. He keeps these terrible movies from becoming complete zeroes. So how good he misses here as a grownup Rusty Griswold with all nuances of his father Clark (Chevy Chase – Spies Like Us, Three Amigos) and his mother Ellen (Beverly D’Angelo – Coal Miner’s Daughter, American History X)? He doesn’t miss at all. Instead, he crushes it in 2015’s comedy of the year.
The movie is kind of a sequel. Or maybe it’s a reboot. In any case, it replays 1983’s National Lampoon’s Vacation, where the Griswold family makes a road trip from Chicago to Wally World, a fictional amusement park in California. Rusty feels a disconnect within his family, especially after learning that his wife Debbie (Christina Applegate – television’s Married With Children, Hall Pass) has been humoring him with the annual family trip to a cabin in the woods each year. As a result, his two children, the nerdy and awkward teenager James (Skyler Gisondo) and his 5th/6th-grade brother Kevin (Steele Stebbins), don’t get along. Kevin bullies his brother in a way that any younger brother should do, and James takes it. Rusty, now a pilot for the jetliner Econo-Air, decides a change is needed. He recalls when he was younger, and his family took a trip to Wally World. He decides this is what he will do.
The are plenty of laughs along the way, including hilarious stops to Debbie’s college, where Rusty tries to wrap his head around her college nickname “Debbie Does Anything”) as well as to Rusty’s sister Audrey’s (Leslie Mann – This is 40, Knocked Up) ranch house where her husband, Stone Crandall (Chris Hemsworth – Thor, In The Heart of the Sea), a chiseled and well-endowed local weatherman steals the show for a good 15 minutes. There are also small stop-offs to a refreshing mineral-rich “hot spring” and a white water rafting trip where seconds before launching the raft, they listen as their instructor (Charlie Day – Horrible Bosses, Horrible Bosses 2) is dumped on his cell phone by the love of his life). These scenes are just some of the many laugh-out-loud moments that Vacation provides. Does every scene work? Of course not. There are quite a few that feel forced on us. But it is easy to forgive those when you are laughing out loud five minutes later. Even some of the humor played out in other movies still have elements of surprise in Vacation. And the film is perfectly cast from the four leads to the cameos by Chase, D’Angelo, Mann, Hemsworth, Day, Ron Livingston, and Norman Reedus.
To the critics who claim that many of these scenes are just gags to get a few laughs, what were you expecting? Cormac McCarthy’s The Road? This was the same formula that their predecessors were giving the Original National Lampoon’s Vacation a 93% aggregate rating. Is Ed Helms as funny in this one as Chevy Chase was in the original? It’s debatable. They both are hilarious. Helms did a fantastic job mimicking Chase’s body and facial expressions. Rusty certainly is believable as Clark’s son. This film is much raunchier than any of the other Vacation movies, and co-writer/directors (Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Jonathan M. Goldstein) take full advantage of this. I’d like to pick out some specific moments, but I don’t want to ruin the surprises for potential viewers. I will say that don’t go by what the critics have said about this movie. If you like the Vacation movies and raunchy humor, I don’t know how you cannot like this movie. And trust me when I say that I was as skeptical going into this film as the next guy. I remember that I was looking forward to seeing it in the theater before seeing how it got slammed by the critics and then telling myself, Oh, Well. My expectations were low when I caught the movie on Netflix, but I was hooked from the very first scene just like an American Pie, Old School, or There’s Something About Mary movie would do.
Plot 7.5/10 (a little bit lower than I might usually score because it’s not entirely original)
Character Development 7.5/10
Character Chemistry 8.5/10
Acting 9.5/10
Screenplay 8.5/10
Directing 8.5/10
Cinematography 8/10
Sound 8/10
Hook and Reel 10/10
Universal Relevance 9/10
85%
Movies You Might Like If You Liked This Movie
- National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
- Horrible Bosses
- The Great Outdoors
- The Hangover
- We’re the Millers