Franchise reboots are nothing new,
but rarer are relaunches of classic comedies, perhaps because the humor is
often so time specific. Vacation has largely been branded as a
remake of the hilarious 1983 road trip comedy, National Lampoon's Vacation, which featured a
screenplay by the great John Hughes, and starred Chevy Chase in his most
memorable role. The updated film is actually more of a true sequel, with Ed
Helms playing the grown-up son, Rusty, who proves to be as hapless at planning
family vacations as his daddy, but that's about where the similarities end as
this foul and unnecessarily crude Vacation may have you choosing to go in to
the office instead.
Written and directed by Jonathan M.
Goldstein and John Francis Daley, the duo responsible for inflicting The Incredible Burt Wonderstone and two Horrible Bosses movies
on an unsuspecting populace, Vacation is basically a series of
low-brow skits loosely connected by a nostalgic family road trip. But what is
desperately missing is the heart and sense of familial bonding that powered
Hughes' screenplay, replaced by rimjob and vomit humor. The story is
essentially the same as the original. Helms plays Rusty, who has grown into a
wacky dufus just like his father, Clark. Planning to take the family on yet
another boring trip to his favorite campground, Rusty sees their lack of
enthusiasm and decides to try something different. Instead, he takes wife
Debbie (Christina Applegate), pencil-neck son James (Skyler Gisondo), and
vulgar young son Kevin (Steele Stebbins) on a journey to Walley World, the
amusement park that he went to with his family as a child. Cue the comic
mishaps.
During one clumsy but chuckle-worthy
scene, Rusty self-referentially makes light of the earlier Vacation,
"This Vacation will stand on its own". And he's right, in a way, as
this film is definitely about ramping up the gross-out factor and pushing
boundaries, perhaps too much so. The attempts to be raunchy are heavy-handed
and desperate; there are only so many glory hole and sexual perversion jokes to
go around, and yet this film continually finds a way to add more with
diminishing results. The original movie certainly went out there on occasion,
particular in the scenes involving cousin Eddie and his kids, but it never felt
like a crutch to be leaned on. However, Daley and Goldstein feel beholden
enough to the original to try and top it on occasion, which usually ends in
some kind of comic misfire. A scene at the Grand Canyon involving Charlie Day
as a suicidal river guide is worth a few laugh for the visuals alone, but isn't
funny like the brief stopover the Griswolds made there in '83. Another scene
literally crashes and burns while paying homage to Christie Brinkley as the
unobtainable object of Clark's affections. 
What's a real shame is that there is
potential for a much better and funnier movie here. Helms' Rusty doesn't
resemble at all the prior versions of the character; perfectly fine considering
the number of actors who played him, but he brings a constant trepidation
(especially in regards to his wife's substantial sexual experience) that is one
of the film's highlights. His shrieking terror at the highly-destructive
features of their souped up Albanian rental car (it has buttons that literally
blow the thing to smithereens, but at least it has two gas tanks) show his gift
for physical comedy. Less effective is a terribly uncomfortable scene in which
he tries to be Rusty's wingman (already awkward) to hook up with a young girl,
only to come across like a pedophile on To Catch a Predator.
Christina Applegate, who has suffered through far too many underwritten wife
roles in the past, does her best to struggle through another one. She gets one
terrific moment in which she revisits her old sorority and tries to prove she's
still a wild child at heart. It goes vomitously wrong for her, of course, but
Applegate literally throws herself into the moment and makes it work. Chris
Hemsworth devours the chance to cheese it up as the buff, big-muscled,
well-endowed Texas Republican husband to Rusty's sister, Audrey (Leslie Mann),
playing off his persona as a charismatic perfect physical specimen. A wealth of
talent goes to waste in bland, unfunny cameos, including Keegan-Michael Key,
Kaitlin Olson, Michael Pena, and Nick Kroll. 
Unfortunately, not even the
re-emergence of Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo as Clark and Ellen Griswold
can put any gas in Vacation's tank. At the very least, Chase
still has the off-kilter weirdness that made Clark such an unforgettable character,
but the screenplay gives him nothing to work with. He arrives just in time to
hammer home the movie's point, that the journey is more important than the
destination, even when the journey blows. With little payoff to justify all of
the pointlessly crass attempts at humor, Vacation fails to
make either the journey or the destination worth it. Consider a "staycation", instead.
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
