Off the rails, but plot stays on track
ANYONE who’s ever spent a night on the town knows that reckless abandon and bad behaviour is not restricted to one gender.
At the movies, however, it felt for quite some time that men were having most of the fun when it came to partying hard.
Bridesmaids helped turned the tide somewhat back in 2011, and in the years since, movies like Trainwreck and Bad Moms have shown that women can indeed cut loose with the best of them.
Of course, there can be consequences to any night of over-indulgence, as the new girls-gone-wild comedy Rough Night depicts with pleasingly madcap energy.
I didn’t find this story of a bachelorette party that veers unexpectedly off the rails hilariously funny but I did find it consistently funny, mainly because it decides to stick to its story and its characters rather than simply allow its stars to ad-lib like crazy in pursuit of a laugh.
That may sound like I’m damning Rough Night with faint praise, but I generally tend to find a comedy that sets up a situation and stays true to exploring it more satisfying than one that aimlessly wanders. Anyway, it’s not like Rough Night is short on laughs. Anything that places the likes of Kate McKinnon ( Ghostbusters), Jillian Bell ( 22 Jump Street) and Ilana Glazer (the TV series Broad City) front and centre simply couldn’t be.
And even though leading lady Scarlett Johansson isn’t best known for comedy, she’s a game and generous straight woman to her co-stars here.
Johansson plays Jess, on the verge of marrying the dependable, devoted Peter (Paul W. Downs) and embarking on a political career.
Her friend and college roommate Alice (Bell) wants to ensure that Jess’s bachelorette weekend is one to remember, so she’s rounded up a handful of mates from their uni days — social activist Frankie (Glazer) and upwardly mobile Blair (Zoe Kravitz) — for some debauched times in Miami.
And joining them is Jess’s Australian friend, Pippa (McKinnon, entertainingly mangling the Aussie accent).
A night on the town starts with cocktails, leads to cocaine and culminates with a male stripper back at the women’s borrowed beachside house.
One accidental head injury later, however, the stripper is dead and Jess and her friends are facing the possibility of personal, professional and political ruin … unless they can get rid of the evidence.
But with everything from a pair of kinky neighbours (Demi Moore and Modern Family’s Ty Burrell) to a runaway jet-ski getting in the way, disposing of a dead body has rarely been so difficult.
One might expect Rough Night’s sense of humour to edge towards darkness based on its premise but the movie actually does a very good job of keeping things relatively light, the whole corpse thing notwithstanding.
It actually works best as a screwball comedy of misadventure and misunderstanding, with the various strains placed on the relationships within this circle of friends proving to be not only amusing but actually kind of touching at times.
Make no mistake, though, Rough Night’s aim is directly at the funny bone.
And it’s on target more often than not.