NEXT GENERATION VACATION
Remake or reboot, another Griswold road trip drives laughs.
T.S. Eliot wrote that “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
Not sure if Vacation, a sortof sequel to, kind-of reboot of 1983’s National Lampoon’s Vacation, achieves that level of enlightenment, but the return to Walley World theme park by the next generation of Griswolds, complete with cameo by paterfamilias Chevy Chase, manages an awkward two-step without stumbling. It arrives where the first film started, and still feels somewhat original.
Or as Ed Helms says in a moment of fourth-wall-breaking sincerity: “The new Vacation will stand on its own.”
Helms plays Rusty Griswold, the role taken by Anthony Michael Hall in the John Hughes-written, Harold Ramis-directed original. In a kind of casting injoke, new actors have taken the role in each of the four spinoffs and one direct-to-video movie since the first.
Rusty works as a pilot on the cut-rate Econo Air — motto: “We’re working hard to earn back your trust” — after having apparently passed with flying colours from the Clarence Oveur School of Malaprops. He also flies jets.
Overhearing how unhappy his family is with their annual log-cabin getaway, he decides to take wife Debbie (Christina Applegate) and two sons (seemingly named after Kevin James) on a road trip to Walley World, which he remembers fondly in spite of his own dad’s mental breakdown when they arrived to find it closed.
Paying homage to the original movie’s Wagon Queen Family Truckster, which looks like something Detroit coughed up after a hard night, the new Griswolds rent a late-model Tartan Prancer. It features Albanian technology, an angry Korean GPS (North Korean, perhaps?) and a chassis that looks like a VW van mated with something long discontinued from Ikea.
The episodic road trip includes a nod to Helms’ Hangover movies — “we don’t remember” becomes the family mantra for their more embarrassing escapades — as well as to City Slickers and even Steven Spielberg’s 1971 TV movie Duel, about a homicidal tractor-trailer. But directors and co-writers John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein (Horrible Bosses 1 and 2) inject a fair bit of originality into the script, including a character who speaks only in faucet metaphors, and a showdown I can only describe as a New Mexican Arizonan Coloradan Utahan standoff.
Granted, much of the creativity hinges on bodily fluids — blood, sweat and tears is only the beginning. But any points lost for excessive gross-out humour are partially redeemed for sheer dedication. When the filmmakers decide that an actor is going to throw up or get covered in feces, they commit. So too does the cast, including the young actors playing Rusty and Debbie’s children, who bring sibling bullying to new, unexpected levels.
The resulting shenanigans won’t be to everyone’s tastes, though the audience at a recent preview screening seemed to be mostly enjoying itself. Your own Vacation appreciation may hinge on how much time you care to spend locked in an Albanian minivan with the Griswolds, and whether you believe that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. ∂∂½
Appreciation depends on whether you believe it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive
Vacation opens across Canada on July 29.