Vacation * (2015, Ed Helms, Christina Applegate, Skyler Gisondo, Steele Stebbins, Chris Hemsworth) – Movie Review

Ed Helms stars as Rusty Griswold, son of old Clark (Chevy Chase), who decides to treat his own reluctant family to a road trip to Walley World just like his dad did in the Eighties to spice up his dull marriage to his wife Debbie (Christina Applegate) and reconnect with his sons James and Kevin (Skyler Gisondo, Steele Stebbins).

Let’s be kind, this reboot of the old 1983 movie just isn’t a laugh riot, with the scattergun jokes almost all falling flat and the bad-taste and inappropriate jokes so not funny that they leave a bad taste in the mouth. The swimming in raw sewage sequence is a true low.

Helms is mostly just not funny, and nor is Gisondo, though both are pleasant enough and hard working performers. Applegate is more amusing and even appealing, definitely a worthy successor to her original counterpart in 1983, while Stebbins is actually funny, making the most of his brat younger brother role and some of the script’s stronger one-liners.

However, Chris Hemsworth is terrible in a misjudged extended cameo as the brother-in-law they visit in Texas, showing no flair with this kind of comedy and demeaning himself by apparently being there simply to showing off his, admittedly impressive, body. They could have hired a Playgirl playmate of the month for that. This movie has done the unthinkable, it has even put me off Thor. The photo at the end with Hemsworth showing his all really is dispiritingly mucky. How was Hemsworth talked into doing this role?

Much changed physically, poor old Chevy is given nothing comedic to do in the thankless role of granddad and he does it quite clumsily, while Beverly D’Angelo has scarcely a line in her old role as his wife. I’m all for giving the original actors roles in reboots, but they have to be properly respected.

Leslie Mann and Charlie Day, normally funny people, are unfunny and wasted. Ditto Ron Livingston, Norman Reedus and Regina Hall. It can’t be all their faults. I’ve got to blame writer-directors  John Francis Daley and Jonathan M Goldstein.

It wasn’t a hit in America, and, with its down-home all-American themes, it’ll probably have even more of a struggle here.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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