‘Game’ is winner at crafting good time
“Game Night” is not trying to be an important social document or a work of art. There’s nothing here designed to create a sense of awe or win awards or be remembered more than a year from now. It’s not a movie that will make you tired, but lack of ambition can sometimes be a strength. This is a comedythriller made simply to please in the moment, and it does, for almost every minute of its 100-minute running time.
The movie achieves, in a seemingly offhand way, a balance between laugh-outloud setups and scenes that are tense and yet never lose their comic shading. Here and there — we’re talking only about scattered moments — the zaniness gets overplayed. But for the most part, “Game Night” is skillfully crafted entertainment, put over by a talented cast that knows how to land a laugh.
It was directed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, the duo responsible for “Vacation,” the 2015 comedy that took the old family film starring Chevy Chase and turned it into an outrageous, coarse delight. The new movie, written by Mark Perez, is at least as delightful though not as coarse. At its center is a couple that loves to play games. Max (Jason Bateman) and Annie (Rachel McAdams) met playing a pub quiz, and they host game nights at their house for a tight group of friends.
Their lives become complicated by the arrival in town of Max’s brother, a wealthy financial tycoon who is better looking than Max and who enjoys undermining his little brother’s confidence. Brooks (Kyle Chandler) holds a game night in his palatial new house, but the evening doesn’t consist of the usual charades or Pictionary. Instead, Brooks announces that everyone present will be witness to a crime, and the prize will go to whoever solves it.
You may have seen this kind of thing before, in movies such as the old ’70s thrill-
er “The Last of Sheila” and the Michael Douglas movie “The Game,” where something starts out a game and then turns serious, or maybe only seems to be serious. But Perez’s script acknowledges that and actually capitalizes on the fact that the audience is ahead of the story. For a good chunk of the movie, for example, part of the fun is knowing that the guns are real that Max and Annie believe to be fake, and that the desperate characters that they assume to be actors are not acting.
The screenplay also shows considerable nimbleness, in that when it switches out of game mode, it finds other ways to create interest and even gain velocity. A key to the movie’s success, modest though it may be, is that the filmmakers approach no scenes or characters as though they were merely functional. Everything and everyone is an opportunity for some extra laugh or some unexpected twist of character or performance.
This extends even to the minor roles. At one point, the protagonists walk into a party thrown by a morally depraved billionaire. The billionaire has maybe three or four lines in the whole movie, but he’s played by Danny Huston, who has played so many high-living villains that he brings those associations with him. Likewise, Michael C. Hall has only two scenes as the criminal mastermind known as “The Bulgarian,” but he creates a comic study in weary, tired-of-it-all evil.
“Game Night” devises running gags throughout the movie and then comes up with ways to keep topping them so they don’t get old. A good example of that is the bit involving a husband (Lamorne Morris) who suspects that his wife (Kylie Bunbury) might have had a onenight stand with Denzel Washington.
“Game Night” won’t change anyone’s life, but if you go to the multiplex and “Black Panther” is sold out, you don’t have to go home. This little movie will do just fine.