National Lampoon's Vacation 2015 (pre-emptive) Review

It's becoming increasingly harder to find anything to say on my blog that hasn't already been tackled by thousands of people before me, but I thought I might be able to beat the rush by reviewing a movie two and a half months before it comes out this July.

Full disclosure: I haven't seen the National Lampoon reboot/sequel/pale imitation of their Vacation franchise at this time (obviously- again, it comes out at the end of July). But I feel comfortable reviewing it now because I've seen the red band trailer. I'm convinced this is all the information I'm going to need.

Like its predecessor, the premise of Vacation is a road trip involving a well-meaning father who thinks driving, as opposed to flying, across the country with his family will bring them closer together and create cherished memories; a fleeting commodity in the modern era. What then follows is a nearly worst possible series of road trip encounters which push the family, and particularly the dad, to their mental breaking points.

This is a strong premise for a comedy. Road pictures are a staple of comedy films (a cliche even) because they allow the writers to only deal with many characters/circumstances for as long as they're funny and then move on to the next event. And when you throw in the positive intentions of the character in the driver's seat, it adds a certain heroic element for the audience to root for.

The original film was one of the best uses of Chevy Chase at the height of his talent. Beginning with the second movie in the series his Clark Griswold turned into a psychotically naive patriarch, which hurt the credibility of the situations he was in. But the original movie felt believable (save for the climax). It felt both funny and horrifying at the same time. In other words, it was a dark comedy.

Now let me be clear, I'm not like a massive FAN of this movie. I rarely warm up to dark comedies, probably because I'm secretly afraid of the world's amorality. Nobody, not even John Cleese with A Fish Called Wanda, has ever been able to convince me that there's anything funny about the untimely death of a pet. But even with my discomfort about the original movie, I can recognize that the comedy works. And that's the key to anyone who tries to pursue anything ever in comedy. It has to work. Being funny is honestly out of your hands, that's the judgement of the audience. Making it work is yours.

So we have a two and a half minute trailer which devotes the first 25 seconds to clips from the original. And right off the bat we have the first problem. It only takes six seconds to establish what franchise we're about to devalue. But instead of using the extra time to hit the heart of the movie or set up the point of the rehash, they show us the scene where Christie Brinkley flirts with Chevy Chase. The reason, as we'll soon see, is so the trailer's punchline will resonate with people who aren't sociopaths.

Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo make as much of an appearance as they're probably going to make in the actual movie. Then we cut to Ed Helms, instead of a grown up Anthony Michael Hall. Helms is the 29th actor to take on the inconsistent role of Russ Griswold, and he establishes that he wants to make one final pilgrimage to Wally World. And we have the first joke of the trailer. His youngest son (are you ready for this?) delivers an obscenity.

Oh. Um. Ah ha ha. We're in really good hands, aren't we? There's snippets of bad driving, explosions and twerking. Then a meta-joke about the original movie. You know the thing about meta-jokes and fourth wall humor? There was a time when these were so sparse and subtle that the inclusion of them was practically an Easter Egg. Today writers lean on them so much that they rarely work anymore. We've had two jokes now and they've both failed.

There's a sexual joke between a father and son that's so blatant that I don't actually understand the joke and can still recognize the obviousness of it. A second sexual joke (I assume. What else could it be?), an extended view of Thor's penis (not a euphemism), and the pivotal swimming-in-sewage scene.

Let's pause for a moment. The Griswold's go for an unintentional swim in sewage. Think about that in terms of humor value. Gross-out humor is hardly ever comedy. It may get a laugh, but that's not the same thing as comedy. Decades ago, people would laugh at gross-out humor because of the shock value. Today shock value is all but non-existent. We've seen it all before. It's boring, tired, and just gross. People still laugh, but now it's more because people are conditioned to laugh. It's automatic.

So not one single joke in this trailer, the very reel that is supposed to showcase the best moments in order to get an audience into the damn theater, has worked. But then we're given the aforementioned punchline: a recreation of the Christie Brinkley scene with another model. The twist is that she's killed in a head-on collision with a semi. I'm still trying to imagine one person on the production team reading that moment in the script and thinking that it was anything other than a desperate hack job of indifference.

The dark humor of the original worked because you could see yourself in Clark's situation. Here is an amiable man aiming for something wonderful, failing, and having to redouble his enthusiasm to uphold what little confidence his family has in him. You cared about him. You sympathized with his pain. You were invested.

The rewrite is clearly determined to keep you out of the characters, encouraging you to laugh AT them, like a bully. The team behind this movie really has no idea what the hell they're doing. They know nothing about the way comedy works. I don't see any reason to give this movie a chance.