There is something
really quite strange about seeing Amy from Gone Girl, a former Doctor Who, and the
assassin dad from Boondock Saints acting in a family comedy together. Even
though What We Did On Our Holiday
tries to be a bit more serious in its approach, mixing in divorce drama and a
cancer death sentence and a critique of the media, that’s still a sociopath, a
time traveler, and a hitman gathering in Scotland together for a family
vacation. It’s … odd.
Maybe it’s because
I’m not British, but really, everything about What We Did On Our Holiday seems
odd. The tone is all over the place, from slapstick physical humor to
melancholy reminiscing about World War II. The characters are mostly a
collection of quirks; everybody gets one thing about them, like “had an affair”
or “has an attitude” or “had a weird public spaz-out captured on YouTube,” and
that’s all the development you’ll see. And although the concluding message
attempts to be a life-affirming one – be nice to one another, even though you’re
different, because you’re family, dammit! – it’s superficially handled. There’s
no real consistency in What We Did On Our Holiday, except for the averageness
of it all.
The film (from
co-writers and co-directors Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin, who have mostly
bounced around British TV) focuses on separated couple Doug (Tennant) and Abi
(Pike), parents of three children; their names don’t matter, but the youngest
girl compulsively steals keys and has friends that are rocks, the middle boy is
obsessed with Vikings, and the oldest girl is horribly anxious about how often
her parents fight and lie to each other. Preparing to visit Doug’s sick father
and pretentious brother in Scotland, he and Abi ask the children to lie about
their separation, opening the door for a variety of misunderstandings when they
finally arrive.
It doesn’t help
that Doug’s father Gordie (Connolly), whose birthday they are celebrating, is
actually dying of cancer, and everyone is in various levels of denial about it.
It’s also not great that Doug’s brother and sister-in-law are judgmental,
social-climbing people who have opinions about everything Doug and Abi do. And
it’s primarily problematic how the three children react to emergency
situations, and how one decision they make reverberates through the family
forever.
There is so much
going on in What We Did On Our Holiday, and it’s what you would mostly expect. The
adults all bicker and fight because they’re focused on the wrong things in
life, like money and security and those kinds of integral subjects that movies
try to pretend don’t matter that much. The kids are precocious and mostly
inappropriate, but their brattiness is presented as a virtue. And Gordie,
because he’s close to death, can dispense all kinds of down-to-earth wisdom so
that everyone can get their shit together.
None of this is
particularly unique, and none of this is particularly good. Connolly is the
best of the lot, and his interactions with the eldest daughter, played by the
teenager Emilia Jones, are the most moving parts of the film. Pike displays the
steeliness that got her to be Amazing Amy in the first place, and Tennant has
good physicality that brings some humor to this endeavor.
But ultimately What
We Did On Our Holiday just doesn’t do or say that much, and what it does
accomplish is fine at best. Oh, we should all be nicer to each other? That's the whole point of this disjointed thing? Yeah. OK.
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 Guttenbergs
