A night out turns deadly funny
Rough Night
(out of 4) Starring Scarlett Johansson, Kate McKinnon, Jillian Bell, Ilana Glazer and Zoë Kravitz. Directed by Lucia Aniello. Opens Friday at GTA theatres. 101 minutes. 14A
Rough Night is a comedy about a bachelorette party that goes fatally wrong and keeps getting wronger, usually to humorous effect.
Consider this no small achievement. It’s hard to move from tragedy to something resembling hilarity, although the laughs are very dark.
Peter Berg didn’t manage it a generation ago with the male-dominated Very Bad Things, the movie this one most resembles. He couldn’t find a way up from the story’s bleak downward spiral.
Rough Night director/co-writer Lucia Aniello pulls it off with her distaff version. She also sends up the sexist stereotype of a groom-to-be and his pals running wild — as in The Hangover and its imitators — while the bride-to-be frets back home.
This time it’s bride-to-be Jess (Scarlett Johansson) and her gal pals who are on a tear, in Miami rather than Vegas, while her fiancé Peter (Paul W. Downs, who also co-writes) is left behind at home frantically worrying.
Jess and her college chums Alice (Jillian Bell), Frankie (Ilana Glazer) and Blair (Zoë Kravitz) haven’t seen much of each other in the 10 years since they graduated. They’re determined to make up for lost time — or at least Alice is, being the one of the four who never really grew up.
Jess has to at least try to be an adult, since she’s running for state senator in a close race. No drunken Facebook posts, and please don’t spill red wine on the carpet of the mansion borrowed from a wealthy Miami supporter!
There’s also the wild card of Pippa (Kate McKinnon), an Australian newcomer who seems to be challenging the BFF status for Jess that Alice jealously considers to be her own.
But then the clubbing, cocaine and shots commence, and before you know it — and as the trailer has already revealed — a male stripper is lying dead on the mansion floor.
So far, so not very funny, but it’s the ensuing attempt at a coverup that makes the comedy succeed. Aniello and Downs have cleverly written the characters in such a way that not calling the cops seems almost plausible.
Jess has her political career to consider. Frankie is a social-justice activist who already faces jail time for previous trouble. Blair is fighting a bitter custody battle with her estranged husband. Alice and Pippa are loose cannons who can barely see straight, let alone testify.
What to do with the bothersome body? It doesn’t help that the swingers next door, amusingly overplayed by Demi Moore and Ty Burrell, may have caught incriminating evidence on their security camera.
Meanwhile, frantic fiancé Peter can’t bear the thought that maybe cellphone silence from Jess means she’s trying to call the wedding off.
Rough Night has many narrative bumps, but what smooths them is the great chemistry of the five women caught in the central dilemma.
Petty jealousies and catty comments emerge, but so do elements of personality and sexual orientation that help make this movie more than the same-old of formula comedies. This is Girls Gone Wild with a brutally female gaze, and it’s all the better for it.