Movie Review: ‘Vacation’

In 1983, Clark Griswold and his family set out on a cross-country journey to the most magical of vacation destinations: Walley World, a near-mythical California theme park. The adventures of the Griswold clan were captured in National Lampoon’s Vacation, a landmark comedy film that became a box office sensation – and now, the next generation of Griswolds are embarking on their own road trip.

More than thirty years have passed since the events of the original film, and Rusty Griswold (Ed Helms) still fondly remembers his family’s Walley World excursion – so fondly, in fact, that he decides to subject his own family to the same ill-fated escapade. Packing Debbie (Christina Applegate) and the boys into a ridiculously conceived foreign rental car, the Griswolds head out of Chicago and onto the open road, where they’re faced with one mishap after another. Sounds familiar, right?

But things have changed since 1983, and this new Vacation cranks the raunchiness into overdrive with jokes about glory holes, dicks, truck-driving rapists, dicks, an attempted public orgy, and even more dicks. Whether they’re spray-painted on the side of a vehicle or hanging out of Chris Hemsworth’s boxer briefs, this Vacation includes more than enough dicks to go around. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with crass, bawdy humor – but vulgarity just for the sake of vulgarity is rarely funny, and this film serves as a perfect example.

Vacation also tries to mine humor out of the nonstop bullying of James Griswold (Skyler Gisondo) by his brother Kevin (Steele Stebbins). Throughout the film, James is made to feel like an outcast for things like keeping a dream diary or playing an acoustic guitar (across which Kevin has scrawled “I have a vagina” in permanent marker), and the first introduction to the boys features an incredibly insensitive conversation about gender identity. Sure, James ultimately stands up for himself and gets a measure of revenge, but every mean-spirited exchange between the two brothers is played for laughs, and most of it is painfully unfunny. If these are the kinds of “jokes” we can expect from screenwriters John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, then my enthusiasm for the Spider-Man reboot has dropped considerably.

The duo are familiar enough with the source material to insert numerous winks and nods that fans will appreciate, but Daley and Goldstein seem to have absolutely no grasp of the elements that made the original film so successful. The heart and charm that turned National Lampoon’s Vacation into an enduring comedy classic are nowhere to be found in the 2015 version – instead, they’ve been replaced by a steady parade of gross-out gags that include projectile vomiting, swimming in human waste, and bovine cannibalism. Oh, and don’t forget those dicks!

Vacation joins the ever-growing list of unwanted and unnecessary Hollywood reboots, a transparent attempt to parlay nostalgia into a few easy bucks. It offers up a meager helping of genuine laughs, but they’re lost amid a sea of crude, tasteless “humor” that comes across as little more than a desperate attempt to be outrageous. But as scandalous as it may try to be, there’s something much more important that Vacation forgot to try: being funny.