VACATION FRIENDS Review
Give Hulu this, they seem to be dead set on cornering the market of “straight to streaming” films that make for easily digestible summer fare. Mainly I’m basing this off the release of last summer’s PALM SPRINGS, a Hulu released film that gave isolated, pent up audiences a taste of the outdoors, particularly those bright blue skies of California. Mixing comedy with a high concept plot underscored by an overall groovy vibe, that Andy Samberg-Cristin Milioti vehicle made for a nicely surprising respite in a year beset by uncertainty. With this year’s VACATION FRIENDS, audiences, still more or less dusting off the gloom of a pandemic still making the rounds, are offered a much more low-stakes and much less original film that breezes by into the realm of forgetabbleness.
There’s comfort to be found in a film that kind of just exists on its own breezy mentality though. Boasting five writers (Tom Mullen, Tim Mullen, Clay Tarver, Jonathan Goldstein, and John Francis Daley) and directed by Tarver himself, VACATION FRIENDS is as complex as its title as we follow our typical high strung male protagonist Marcus (Lil Rel Howery) and his even-centered fiancée Emily (Yvonne Orji) trying to have a lovely vacation in Mexico. Of course, things don’t work out as Marcus would hope as the gods instead grant him and Emily the company of two lovable airheads, Ron (John Cena) and Kyla (Meredith Hagner), a chaotic couple that lives in the moment (and also commits a few unintentional crimes here or there). Showing Marcus and Emily the times of their lives, and connecting with the couple in more ways than one, it’s not long before light promises to reconnect come back to haunt Marcus and Emily as they soon find Ron and Kyla butting into their lives back home in the States.
From there VACATION FRIENDS coasts on various scenes of the mismatched couples comedically (in theory, at least) figuring out how to mesh with one another, learning a thing or two about not judging books by their covers and friendship and all that other totally new stuff you’ve totally never seen in a studio comedy before. To their credit, even in the presence of an unimaginative film, each of the performers cater to their one-note characters to the best of their abilities. Mr. Howery, taking on the role of every comedy’s “straight man” plays to the tune of a constantly harried man trying to keep his life in check in the face of the chaos caused by Ron and Kyla, who, if they weren’t so well-intentioned and attractive, would probably be in jail by now. While Mr. Cena and Ms. Hagner get much more to bite on in terms of outlandish comedy antics and dialogue (and bring their own patented talents to said roles), it’s disappointing that Howery and Ms. Orji are left to be the sticks in the mud, who, surprise suprise, are shown to not take things so seriously and like, just live lifeee mannnnn!
None of this is groundbreaking in any sense of the word but even the most redundant of film ideas can find gold if the material is solid enough and sadly, the writers and Mr. Tarver take too light of an approach to their film. Despite the presence of repetitive vulgar dialogue, a “tripping out on drugs” scene, and even the vague drama of unintended pregnancy with a stranger, none of these scenes reach their tasteless and/or comedic heights as the filmmaker and his writers approach these ideas with a disappointingly restrained approach. With an unwieldy pace (that at times feels a tad longer than its 1 hour and 43 minute runtime) and an uneven story structure, VACATION FRIENDS is left to bank on the strength of the writing and performances. As it turns out, the performers’ own quality gets let down as the five writers fill scenes with well tread upon material seen in other comedy films. Amid all that though, emerges the faintest hints of surprising warmth and darkness, particularly in the reason behind Ron’s aggressively nice persona which Cena ably displays. While Ron and Kyla are ultimately just a pair of goofballs, they’re only operating under the best of intentions and both Cena and Hagner find a way to offset their cartoonish actions with that genuine care for Howery and Orji’s characters.
In those more heartwarming moments, which the writers can never fully connect to the comedic elements of their film, VACATION FRIENDS shows faint promises of becoming a sort of PLANES, TRAINS, AND AUTOMOBILES successor. Sadly, the film is never as funny or realized or heartwarming as that classic and what’s left is an occasionally humorous comedy that is content to be what it says on the box.
2/5
