☆☆☆☆
There's more blood spilled and a higher body count in Game Night than in most horror films, yet somehow this is a movie so raucously, effortlessly funny and charming it makes you guffaw when you see a guy whose body is splattered into little tiny pieces.
That really does happen in Game Night, but even telling you that feels like a mild betrayal of the film's central conceit, which is that it presents itself as a mild, slightly bawdy comedy of the Judd Apatow variety before going into a wildly different direction and taking so many weird and wild detours that it all makes perfect sense even while making no sense at all.
Nothing about Game Night resembles reality, or maybe a better way to put it would be that the whole movie exists in a sort of surreal, hyper-reality, underscored by the film's occasional and effective use of tilt-shift photography to lend a sense that the whole movie takes place on a giant game board.
Indeed, there are times when the movie -- which is directed with carefree abandon by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein -- seems to be making its next move based on drawing Chance cards; it's never entirely clear what's going to happen next in a script that I would have guessed had been written by several people but is in fact credited only to one guy, Mark Perez, who must be a very funny and unpredictable guy.
The story starts with two hyper-competitive game lovers, Max (Jason Bateman) and Annie (Rachel McAdams), who meet and get married based almost solely on their infatuation with games of any sort: video games, board games, parlor games, they love it all. Once a week in their upscale suburban Atlanta home, they gather their friends Kevin (Lamorne Morris), Michelle (Kylie Bunbury), Ryan (Billy Magnussen) and Ryan's oddly consistent choice of girlfriend.
It's the appearance of Max's brother Brooks (Kyle Chandler) that sets things in motion as Brooks suggests a different kind of game night at his house. Shunning their odd next-door neighbor Gary (Jesse Plemons) and bringing along Ryan's older, Irish co-worker Sarah (Sharon Hogan), they've got no idea what's in store.
Brooks has set up an elaborate real-life mystery scenario that's a little like the one in David Fincher's The Game but a little more jocularity. At least, that's the intent, but things go perilously wrong when actual hit-men descend on Brooks's house -- though none of the game night participants are aware that it's not all staged.
The result is an intricate, wild ride that's like a combination of Fincher's film with Martin Scorsese's After Hours, with echoes of Risky Business, Foul Play, Adventures in Babysitting and Ferris Bueller's Day Off thrown in for good measure.
Completely unaware that the game they're playing isn't the real-world role-playing scenario they think, each of the three couples -- Max and Anne, Kevin and Michelle, Ryan and Sarah -- begin trying to solve what they think is the mystery, finally coming together for a fast and funny chase scene that leads to a climax that's just ever-so-slightly overblown and that strains what little credulity the rest of the movie had. Game Night moves from being a small observational comedy to a big-scale, action-oriented movie with ease, but as the scale and scope grow ever bigger, the laughs diminish just a tad.
Still, the energy never flags, and while Bateman and McAdams are sweet and engaging, what's best about the movie is its supporting cast: As a bickering couple with some serious marital trust issues, Morris and Bunbury have a running gag about a tryst she once had with a certain celebrity. Hogan, meanwhile, is the straight woman to the surprisingly goofy and ingratiating turn by Magnussen as a hunky younger guy who might not be all there, intellectually speaking. Whenever the energy of the central storyline threatens to wane even a bit, the movie reliably turns to one of these couples and gets things back on track.
Equally laugh-inducing is Plemons, who creates a fantastically memorable (and straight-faced) character in the ultra-serious, mildly disturbing next-door neighbor who feels left out of game night and holds a torch for his ex-wife -- a torch that burns with rather dangerous intensity.
It's no slight against Game Night to say that it so closely resembles other movies that have similarly combined slapstick comedy with dangerous undertones. Clearly, the filmmakers have learned from those movies and used the essence of other films to create something that works tremendously well on its own.
It may be overblown at times, and every once in a while a hint of malevolence overwhelms the giddiness with a little too much violence -- but those quibbles aside, Game Night makes its hilarity look easy and feel fun, two things any game player will tell you takes a lot of effort and a lot of practice. The hard work pays off: Game Night is a winner.
Viewed March 24, 2018 -- AMC Burbank 16
2015
That really does happen in Game Night, but even telling you that feels like a mild betrayal of the film's central conceit, which is that it presents itself as a mild, slightly bawdy comedy of the Judd Apatow variety before going into a wildly different direction and taking so many weird and wild detours that it all makes perfect sense even while making no sense at all.
Nothing about Game Night resembles reality, or maybe a better way to put it would be that the whole movie exists in a sort of surreal, hyper-reality, underscored by the film's occasional and effective use of tilt-shift photography to lend a sense that the whole movie takes place on a giant game board.
Indeed, there are times when the movie -- which is directed with carefree abandon by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein -- seems to be making its next move based on drawing Chance cards; it's never entirely clear what's going to happen next in a script that I would have guessed had been written by several people but is in fact credited only to one guy, Mark Perez, who must be a very funny and unpredictable guy.
The story starts with two hyper-competitive game lovers, Max (Jason Bateman) and Annie (Rachel McAdams), who meet and get married based almost solely on their infatuation with games of any sort: video games, board games, parlor games, they love it all. Once a week in their upscale suburban Atlanta home, they gather their friends Kevin (Lamorne Morris), Michelle (Kylie Bunbury), Ryan (Billy Magnussen) and Ryan's oddly consistent choice of girlfriend.
It's the appearance of Max's brother Brooks (Kyle Chandler) that sets things in motion as Brooks suggests a different kind of game night at his house. Shunning their odd next-door neighbor Gary (Jesse Plemons) and bringing along Ryan's older, Irish co-worker Sarah (Sharon Hogan), they've got no idea what's in store.
Brooks has set up an elaborate real-life mystery scenario that's a little like the one in David Fincher's The Game but a little more jocularity. At least, that's the intent, but things go perilously wrong when actual hit-men descend on Brooks's house -- though none of the game night participants are aware that it's not all staged.
The result is an intricate, wild ride that's like a combination of Fincher's film with Martin Scorsese's After Hours, with echoes of Risky Business, Foul Play, Adventures in Babysitting and Ferris Bueller's Day Off thrown in for good measure.
Completely unaware that the game they're playing isn't the real-world role-playing scenario they think, each of the three couples -- Max and Anne, Kevin and Michelle, Ryan and Sarah -- begin trying to solve what they think is the mystery, finally coming together for a fast and funny chase scene that leads to a climax that's just ever-so-slightly overblown and that strains what little credulity the rest of the movie had. Game Night moves from being a small observational comedy to a big-scale, action-oriented movie with ease, but as the scale and scope grow ever bigger, the laughs diminish just a tad.
Still, the energy never flags, and while Bateman and McAdams are sweet and engaging, what's best about the movie is its supporting cast: As a bickering couple with some serious marital trust issues, Morris and Bunbury have a running gag about a tryst she once had with a certain celebrity. Hogan, meanwhile, is the straight woman to the surprisingly goofy and ingratiating turn by Magnussen as a hunky younger guy who might not be all there, intellectually speaking. Whenever the energy of the central storyline threatens to wane even a bit, the movie reliably turns to one of these couples and gets things back on track.
Equally laugh-inducing is Plemons, who creates a fantastically memorable (and straight-faced) character in the ultra-serious, mildly disturbing next-door neighbor who feels left out of game night and holds a torch for his ex-wife -- a torch that burns with rather dangerous intensity.
It's no slight against Game Night to say that it so closely resembles other movies that have similarly combined slapstick comedy with dangerous undertones. Clearly, the filmmakers have learned from those movies and used the essence of other films to create something that works tremendously well on its own.
It may be overblown at times, and every once in a while a hint of malevolence overwhelms the giddiness with a little too much violence -- but those quibbles aside, Game Night makes its hilarity look easy and feel fun, two things any game player will tell you takes a lot of effort and a lot of practice. The hard work pays off: Game Night is a winner.
Viewed March 24, 2018 -- AMC Burbank 16
2015
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