Holiday road to Walley World
We stop to laugh on the way
It’s a scene like at any ridiculously popular theme park. The smell of sunscreen is in the air, signage with cute animal creatures abounds, and there’s an endless line into the coolest ride.
This locale is special, though, especially to old-school-comedy audiences. Walley World and the Griswolds are back on screen in a new Vacation movie, and there is fun and hijinks to be had on set at the transformed Six Flags Over Georgia.
The revelry at the moment comes at the expense of writer/ directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, who are feeling the playful wrath of star Christina Applegate as she flings almonds at them while they’re watching the last few takes.
“Write this: ‘Goldstein says Applegate is being difficult,’ ” Goldstein deadpans, a nut just missing his right ear.
The toughest times are often the most hilarious in this new take on the Griswold family road trip that started with 1983’s original Vacation, this time with an adult Rusty Griswold (Ed Helms), wife Debbie (Applegate), bookish older son James (Skyler Gisondo) and Kevin (Steele Stebbins), his absolute terror of a little brother.
“There’s a link to the first film that’s undeniable,” Helms says. “But the stops along the way, the experiences, the jokes, they all come from a fresh new place.”
Vacation marks the first directorial feature for the Daley/Goldstein duo, who have been hired to write a new Spider-Man solo movie. The installment needed healthy respect for the original while also standing alone.
“If you talk to someone under 23, the likelihood is that they haven’t seen any of the Vacation movies,” Daley says.
This generation of Griswolds arrives at Walley World after a disastrous path from Chicago to California involving car crashes, death-defying whitewater rafting, swimming in raw sewage and a nasty incident involving a cow and an ATV at the estate of Rusty’s sister Audrey (Leslie Mann) and her weatherman husband (Chris Hemsworth). But with that all behind them, they’re waiting in line for the awesome Velociraptor roller coaster and are now feeling the exhaustion of the journey.
Helms wears a big grin to reflect Rusty’s undying optimism, though he looks as perturbed as the rest of his family when the wait time changes from one hour to two.
“Even more bored,” Goldstein says after the take. “Less cheerful this one.”
Daley suggests a mix of “amused and incredulous” for Helms, and then Goldstein has a perfect line for the littlest Griswold in reaction to the longer wait time: “Give Kevin a ‘ What the (expletive)!’ ”
Stebbins, 12, not surprisingly gets a kick out of his vocabulary’s vulgarity, and his parents are cool with it, he says. “I don’t necessarily repeat it.”
He gets most of Vacation’s best lines, usually at the expense of his onscreen bro, an endless target of emotional and physical bullying from his shorter sibling.
“It’s a lot of him hitting me,” says Gisondo, 19. “Come like the eighth hour of having a plastic bag over my head, I still tell myself I’m having a good time.”
Applegate based her character on modern moms she sees at preschool. The Griswold matriarch is trying to get past the sordid “Debbie Do Anything ” period in her life, resurrected when the family visits her alma mater.
Yet they’re all on the same road to making the Griswold family unit tighter, Applegate says:
“Everyone comes through with a lesson learned at the end of the journey, which you always do when you go to hell and back.”