‘Vacation Friends’ Review: A Predictable, Platitude-Filled Comedy
While ‘Vacation Friends’ contains decent performances, its story feels way too derivative, preventing it from becoming one of 2021’s more memorable comedies.
Within the first few minutes of Clay Tarver’s “Vacation Friends”, the ending can already be predicted. It tells the story of a newly engaged, conservative couple, Marcus and Emily (Lil Rel Howery and Yvonne Orji), who meet a rather odd and wild couple, Ron and Kyla (John Cena and Meredith Hanger) while on vacation in Mexico. Both couples spend an insane week, filled with drugs, alcohol, and debauchery, with Ron and Kyla pushing Marcus and Emily over their limit as they embrace their wild side. The engaged couple ends up wanting to forget everything that’s happened in Mexico, and hope to never see Ron and Kyla again. Seven months pass, and they’re finally getting an intimate wedding when Ron and Kyla magically show up and tarnish what they’ve planned, while simultaneously seducing Emily’s father (Robert Wisdom) in the process. By then, it becomes clear that Marcus and Emily will, at first, hate the mere presence of Ron and Kyla and believe they’re going to ruin everything, but will slowly warm up to them and become true friends. It’s a story we’ve all seen before, and “Vacation Friends” doesn’t do anything to spice it up a bit.
If you’ve seen movies like “That’s My Boy,” “What About Bob?,” or “Wedding Crashers,” you’ve seen Vacation Friends. In What About Bob?, Bob (Bill Murray) warms up to Leo Marvin's (Richard Dreyfuss) family, while the doctor is annoyed by his presence, to the point where he’ll become crazy. In “Vacation Friends,” Ron and Kyla warm up to everyone, except for Marcus and Emily, who believe they are legitimately crazy, even though everything they do is inoffensive. It will obviously cause a rift between the two couples, only for them to realize that they were wrong in the end. It’s all been done before, and heavily borrows from buddy comedies of the past to craft its story. There isn’t a single surprise in its plot, nor in its comedy. Most jokes have already been done before, and aren’t reinvented here.
Take, for example, a scene where Emily’s father gives Marcus his family’s rings and asks him to guard them with his life. Of course, he’ll eventually lose the rings through an elaborate physical skit, and while Tarver tries to do something different with his visual representation of the skit - with super slow-mo showing the improbable correlations that’ll lead to Marcus eventually losing the rings - seeing the joke coming a mile away still results in a rather tedious watch. The entire first half of the film is just as tedious. It takes that long to set up the main protagonists of the film and foreshadow their dynamics, functioning essentially as a protracted first act. We get to spend that entire half of the film sitting through repetitive situations all involving some form of debauchery (drugs, alcohol, or sex), that become more and more unfunny as the film rolls along, in part due to the repetitive nature of the jokes, but also because the basis of the film’s jokes and diverse comedic situations aren’t funny to begin with.
There are few actors that are able to make the art of yelling in a childish manner funny, so few that they can be counted on the fingers of one hand: Will Ferrell, Bobcat Goldthwait, Nicolas Cage, Adam Sandler, and Steve Carell. They make yelling funny because they know how to bathe themselves into the absurdity of any given situation, and understand the childishness of their characters. That’s why, for example, Ferrell worked brilliantly in “Elf,” because he understood the origins of his character, who would be completely disoriented once he came out of his safe bubble in the North Pole to the real world, in New York. In the case of John Cena, on the other hand, his absurd tenure in “Vacation Friends” seems to be more tired than anything else. And while Cena is a great comedic actor, as evidently demonstrated in films like “Blockers” and, more recently, “The Suicide Squad,” his character in Vacation Friends feels so familiar that he can never make it is own. Cena is plagued in the shadow of Sandler and Ferrell as he starts to yell, and can almost never make the haphazard material he receives funny.
Thankfully, his chemistry with Lil Rel Howery makes the film just barely watchable. Both of them are great actors, and it’s fun to see them interact with one another, even if the material is quite uninspired. They’re greatly complemented with the legendary Robert Wisdom, who portrays a rather tough father who doesn’t approve of Marcus at first, but will eventually warm up to him and showcase his heart of gold. Wisdom can act with his eyes closed, and it’s a thrill to see him in a film like this, bringing a much-needed slice of emotional levity to a movie that desperately needs some. And while Yvonne Orji and Meredith Hanger are decent enough in their roles, it’s Cena and Howery’s chemistry that more than makes up for the comedic platitudes of Vacation Friends.
As much as Vacation Friends wants to impress with its talented cast, and comedic situations that Tarver wants you to believe are original and inventive, you can’t help but feel its familiarity permeating the script from the first frame to the last. And while there are a few instances of funny comedy sandwiched through predictable scenes, it still isn’t enough to warrant a recommendation. Though it’s readily available on Hulu (or Disney+, if you live internationally), and it’s a relatively harmless watch, there are better comedies for you to spend your time with than Vacation Friends.