Game Night Review

I don't know if anyone has really noticed, but I don't review a ton of straight-up comedies on this blog. And that's not because I'm a Grinch who hates laughing. It's just that a lot of modern comedies that hit theaters just aren't my cup of tea. So much of them are stuffed full of toilet humor or raunchiness because apparently that's what's funny for audiences today. It's for that same reason that I don't watch very many modern sitcoms. They don't make me laugh. I love my 80's and 90's sitcoms and I wish we had more of that humor around. But we don't. So I simply decide to let people enjoy their dumb sitcoms and dumb raunchy comedies that hit theaters and move on with my life. There's enough humor mixed in with other movie genres such as many of the MCU movies as well as a lot of the Netflix stand-up comedy specials that all help me get my comedy fix. So I'm content with all of that. However, "Game Night" is a movie that really caught my attention as the trailers were absolutely hilarious and the premise seemed quite genius, so I crossed my fingers that it would be a comedy worth seeing. When the reviews started flowing in, I was quite encouraged that they were mostly positive. Thus I was given the confidence to give this one a chance.

The premise for this movie is centered around a group of family and friends who enjoy having game nights with each other. I feel this is a relatable setting. Everyone loves having a game night, right? At least we do in my family as do most of my friends in my little corner of the world. So I felt it was a clever premise. In this movie "Game Night," Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams play a very competitive married couple who enjoy having game nights with their inner circle of friends. The biggest conflict, at least on Jason Bateman's side of things, is that is his older brother, played by Kyle Chandler, has always been so much better than him. He has more money, a fancier job, a super nice car, a huge house, is claimed to be so much more attractive, and all of that jazz. At this moment in time, he just happens to be in town for a little while and comes over to Jason Bateman's very modest house, down talks him the whole night, then owns him in every game they play. At the end of the night, he then invites everyone over to his huge house where they are going to have a real game night. A super fancy, eloquent murder mystery of sorts. But it all goes very wrong when Kyle Chandler gets kidnapped and mobbed by actual mobsters, yet the rest of the company think it's all a part of the game.

Thus with this we get a modern take on Bill Murray's "The Man Who Knew Too Little" as it's absolutely hilarious watching Kyle Chandler get beat up while trying to defend himself against these two mobsters while everyone else is sitting around commenting on the cheese, arguing among themselves, being surprised at how strong the glass tables are and being impressed at how realistic this whole fight looks. After Kyle Chandler is officially tied up and dragged out of the house, with the mobsters telling no one to follow them or they will get killed, the three couples all have different strategies as to how they are going to "win the game" by saving Kyle Chandler. Thus we are sent on quite the wild adventure with these three couples, all of whom have different levels of hilarious chemistry and running gags of problems they need to solve among themselves while competing against each other. On paper it seems like a lot for the movie to balance, especially considering the fact that I'm only describing the first part of the movie as the movie goes in a lot of crazy directions in the second and third acts. This all could've blown up in the faces of our directors, but instead it's handled with care as everything is impressively woven together.

A lot of the credit here goes to the chemistry among the actors. Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams work great together as our main married couple. The banter among the two of them is hilarious and both of them made me laugh quite a bit. I was especially impressed with Rachel McAdams as doing comedy is not exactly her normal wheelhouse. Jason Bateman does a lot of these comedies, so it's no surprise that he's able to pull this off, but thanks mostly to "The Notebook," Rachel McAdams has been typecast as an actress who mostly does romance dramas. Even in non chick flick movies, she's usually the side note as the girlfriend or the wife to the main character who is the real focus, like in "Southpaw" or "Doctor Strange." She did show in "Spotlight" that she can be more than just the token love interest and she does that again here as she's not just a side show to Jason Bateman, but leads the way in hilarious manner. She was one of the funniest characters in the movie, second only another character I will mention here in a second. Even though Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams are our main focus, I do have to give credit to our other two couples, Lamorne Morris and Kylie Bunbury as well as Billy Magnussen and Sharon Horgan, who are great for reasons I'll let you discover.

But as a just barely mentioned, there is another character outside of the main seven that I have already referred to that absolutely steals the show and that is Jesse Plemons. Most of you will probably know him as Todd from "Breaking Bad." At least that's where I know him from. He was in 65 episodes of "Friday Night Lights" before "Breaking Bad" and 10 episodes of "Fargo" afterwards, but as I haven't seen those TV shows, I can't judge how he was in there. But he was fantastic in "Breaking Bad" and has been showing up on the big screen in various roles, so I feel he's about to get his huge cinematic break and he proves in here that he deserves it as pretty much every time he shows up on screen, he had me busting up laughing. He plays the police officer neighbor of Bateman and McAdams who wants to be included in the game nights, but is a bit socially awkward, so instead of being upfront and welcoming to him, they try their best to politely sidestep things, which sends him on a mission to figure out how to be included. The specialty of his humor is the serious deadpan humor, which if done right, I find to be the best form of comedy and absolutely nails it every time the camera comes to him, most of which is due to how hilariously awkward he makes each scene.

I do want to tread lightly when it comes to describing my feelings of the entire movie, so I'll instead be vague in saying that the tone of the movie shifts a bit from what we were treated to in the first act of the movie and that did have me worried initially, but the transition ended up being surprisingly flawless and I found myself enjoying the many aspects of this film that were thrown at me, which included plenty of drama, some heartfelt moments that worked really well and some solid action sequences that I wasn't expecting. For making all of this work, I have to give a lot of credit to our directing duo of John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein. Often the focus of comedies is on all of the gags and what they can do to make the next gag work, but Daley and Goldstein managed to do a lot more than just that as this was a well-crafted film with sharp editing, great camera work, solid cinematography and clever visual effects that helped tell this story instead of relying solely on the scrip and the actors' abilities to deliver properly. This style of comedy made this feel very much like an Edgar Wright film instead of being another generic comedy. Daley and Goldstein are currently attached to DC's "Flashpoint" and I now have the confidence that they can pull that off.

When push comes to shove, when I go into a comedy, what I desire most from that comedy is some good escapism. Yes, I love analyzing film because doing so helps me better appreciate that films that are done right. But with comedies, I just want to go in, forget about the world around me and have a fun time. I don't need Oscar-worthy performances from the cast or pure perfection from a technical standpoint or from the story. I just want to laugh and have a good time. And that's exactly what "Game Night" was able to provide for me. We had a clever premise that set up a fun movie. We had a great balance of characters that made for a variety of different humor that kept things fresh throughout. And we had a great cast that all brought their comedic A-Game, led by Jesse Plemons and Rachel McAdams as the funniest characters. And I won't lie to you and say that this is all clean, family-friendly humor, but this isn't a raunchy comedy at all, which I personally appreciated. It gets its strong rating mainly due to violence and blood with a bit of language rather than the raunchy, sexual toilet humor of most other modern comedies. So if you're having a rough day and you want to escape the world for an hour or two, I'd say "Game Night" is a solid choice. I'll give it an 8/10.