Movie Reaction: Rough Night

Formula: (Very Bad Things / Weekend At Bernie's) * Bridesmaids

I've been doing formulas for a while. Since my second Reaction, back in 2011, in fact. That's a couple hundred so far. There's some variance to the quality of the formulas. Sometimes I'm just too lazy to look for a comparable film. Other times, the movie really is too singular to put into pseudo-math. However, there are some films that I can't stop formulizing. Rough Night is a movie that's lousy with comparisons. Looking at the premise, Very Bad Things immediately comes to mind. Considering the cast, Bridesmaids is obvious. Some of the hijinks call Weekend At Bernie's to mind. The most casual observer may call it a female Hangover. Emotionally, it got me thinking of The World's End more than I expected. In other words, Rough Night is working in some familiar territory, and that's not a bad thing. The reason I insist on the formulas (other than I have fun doing them) is to point out that there aren't that many original ideas out there. From major studios to the smallest of indie film companies, everyone is telling familiar stories. The key part is how well those stories are told.

Rough Night is the story of a bachelorette party gone wrong. Scarlett Johansson, Jillian Bell, Zoe Kravitz, Ilana Glazer, and Kate McKinnon play five college friends (Ok, four college friends and an Kiwi Australian) who meet up in Miami for a wild weekend. Jess (Johansson) is the one getting married. She's busy running for state Senate. Alice (Bell) is the mastermind of the weekend, refusing to let anyone take it easy. Blair and Frankie (Kravitz and Glazer) round out the college group. Pippa (McKinnon) is a friend of Jess' she met during her summer abroad in Australia and is meeting the group for the first time. It's clear that the group has become distant over the last few years. Alice is pushing hard to make this weekend as memorable as possible. She succeeds at that when they accidentally kill a stripper they order at their rental home. That's when the zany antics get really dialed up. The women have to figure out how to hide the body and handle some nosy and horny neighbors played Ty Burrell and Demi Moore. Jess' fiance (Paul Downs) gets the wrong idea after a cryptic phone call and has a side adventure in which he races down to Miami, thinking Jess is backing out of the wedding.

The story needs a lot of narrative heavy lifting to work. In the age of the internet, every story of miscommunication and escalation is a little bit more complicated in general and the screenplay works very hard to absolve the women of the stripper's death. If I was judging this by my One Big Leap standards, which even gives comedies a little more leeway, it wouldn't come close to passing. The story is built entirely on contrivance and coincidence. It makes a few misguided attempts at genuine emotion which fall flat. In a movie this over the top, there's no room for a person to honestly reflect on the fact that she just killed a man or to  introduce sick parents into the mix. Those moments kill all momentum the movie has going for it and remind the audience how implausible this all is. Simply put, it's just not a good enough movie to fit some heart into it the way that, say, Bridesmaids or The World's End does.

That's not to say this is a bad movie. Clunky plot and poorly inserted emotion aside, this is a comedy movie with a strong ensemble and some good jokes. Jonhansson is probably the least funny person in the main cast, which isn't a knock on her. She's the straight woman and the glue for the ensemble. Bell dominates the scenes she's in. She's positioned with the Melissa McCarthy breakout role if you want to make the Bridesmaids comparison. Glazer and Kravitz get their moments. As the one with more of a comedy background, Glazer generates more of the laughs from their scenes. Kravitz is fine though. McKinnon's character isn't much more than a funny accent. It's impressive how much mileage she gets out of that though. Speaking of mileage, I don't know what to make of Downs' scenes, road-tripping to Miami and running into several obstacles along the way. He's in his own movie most of the time and those scenes are trying way too hard. His energy mostly makes them work.

Rough Night is by no means a perfect comedy, but it is a comedy. It knows that it needs to get a laugh every x seconds and accomplishes that. It would rather be silly than take itself seriously the vast majority of the time. It collects a bunch of funny people and lets them bounce off one another, which is a good formula. After notable disappointments like Baywatch and Snatched over the last couple months, it's nice to watch a comedy that knows what it's doing. The is a competent movie that gets the job done. What more do you need?

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend