This ‘Vacation’ takes the low road, too
Rusty, my how you’ve grown. And changed.
In 1983, moviegoers went on National Lampoon’s “Vacation” with Clark and Ellen Griswold and their two children, played by Chevy Chase, Beverly D’Angelo, Anthony Michael Hall and Dana Barron. They were bound for an amusement park called Walley World in a station wagon with, at one point, a cranky aunt and dog in tow. The trip didn’t go as planned; not everyone even made it out alive.
More than three decades later, Rusty is now a husband, father of two boys, regional pilot for a budget airline, resident of suburban Chicago and played by Ed Helms from “The Office,” “The Hangover” and “We’re the Millers.” He’s the go-to actor for a sympathetic doofus who wants to do the right thing but invariably does the wrong or cringe-worthy thing.
In “Vacation,” he overhears wife Debbie (Christina Applegate) tell a friend that she and their squabbling sons (Skyler Gisondo and Steele Stebbins) hate the Michigan vacation cabin the family has rented for the past decade. Rusty decides to re-create the drive West and says, as much about the road trip as the big-screen comedy, “The new vacation will stand on its own.”
And it does, although it borrows the formula from the first, including the shifting tone, but minus the racist gags. It has gross-out humor, including projectile vomiting, a potty-mouthed child with a bullying streak, a squalid motel and sewage bath, along with a dad who just wants to sing along to the radio with his family in his rented Albanian-made car, and ride the Velociraptor with them at Walley World.
Crazy Cousin Eddie is nowhere in sight but the Griswolds stop to see Rusty’s sister, Audrey (Leslie Mann), and her husband, Stone Crandall (Chris Hemsworth). He’s not the god of thunder here but a successful TV weatherman with a heavenly body, which his clothing can barely contain or conceal.
Mishaps, marital revelations, near brushes with death and other disasters eventually push even the optimistic Rusty to wonder if Debbie is right when she says, “Can you just admit this was a mistake?” But the vacation yields all sorts of firsts, plus second chances and
even some advice from the architects of the classic Griswold cross-country adventure.
Written and directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, the Rrated comedy aims low and succeeds. It benefits, however, from the ghosts of film families past, the likability of Mr. Helms, the old-fashioned notion of a road trip and the reminder that no matter how awful your vacation, there is always someone (even if just on the big screen) staying in a grungier motel, standing in a longer line and visiting relatives even more successful and sculpted than Mr. Hemsworth.
Well, maybe not that last one.
“Vacation,“opening in theaters today, proves that anticipation sometimes is better than participation, although it’s hard to beat the enduring allure of Walley World, the chance to sing along to Seal on the radio and join travelers who aren’t obsessed with selfies and Facebook and documenting a trip instead of enjoying or enduring it.