Game Night

Game Night is the Toyota Camry of movies. The advertising promises that this year's model is more exciting than last, that it's sexy and fun, a blast in the corners.

It's not. Maybe it's got new lights, some fake vents and spoilers and a sleek infotainment system guaranteed to confound its occupants. But underneath the fakery, every new Camry is really just a very safe, boring vehicle, one you don't want to get stuck behind on the freeway because it's sure to go exactly the speed limit. Sure, it gets you to where you want to go, but there's not much fun on the way.

Game Night is solid. It's the safe bet, the movie that your boring-ass neighbor will buy on DVD and put next to his copies of Forrest Gump and under his Thomas Kinkade lithograph. But that fucker also gets excited about snow blowers and the efficiency of his dishwasher. This is the movie Consumer Reports would recommend because it scores high on their criteria that emphasize trunk space over joy. 

Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams play Max and Annie, a couple struggling to conceive and who also host boring-ass game nights with their equally uninteresting friends. They live on a cul-de-sac and they drive, not a Toyota, but a Nissan. What a twist! They have steady careers and appear to have no depth beyond competitive Yahtzee and throw pillows. In other words, they are like your real neighbors, if you live in a community with a homeowners association.

Max's brother Brooks (Kyle Chandler) joins their game nights. He's a wildly successful bachelor, and Max is jealous because he can buy mildly nicer cars and live in somewhat fancier houses. It is the wet dream of boring fuckwads to not want a better world, but a slightly nicer house for themselves. A house that's just a little better than what their friends have. And these characters are all boring fuckwads. These people have Camry aspirations.

Brooks volunteers to host, and then hires a murder mystery company to liven things up. In the beige walls fantasy of Game Night, the interesting guy is the one who plans a murder mystery party. In my world, that's the asshole you never talk to again. The only people who like that shit are the people who did theater in high school, or love novels about grannies who solve crimes with the help of their cats.

What Brooks tells nobody is that his success is an illusion. He hasn't made it in the legit business world and is actually a criminal smuggler. The murder mystery party gets mingled with his business when he is really kidnapped by someone he double-crossed. From there, everyone, including the audience, has to guess what's part of the game, and what's real. Max, Annie and their friends are sent on a late night scavenger hunt to find him. 

The set-up is an obvious conceit. There have been an assload of sitcoms and movies with the premise of acting and real-life mingling and people not knowing which. Hell, there's probably a dozen times Ralph Furley double-taked in such circumstances. But, if you're going to use a tried-and-true structure, you better be pretty fucking tight and clever within it.

Game Night is not. There are some bright moments in the movie, many coming from Max and Annie's next door neighbor, a deeply unsettled and lonely cop (Jesse Plemons) who sure would like to be included in game nights. But the best bits come early, before the story becomes as convoluted as a Doberman's intestines.

Bad writers and directors seem to think size is a substitute for cleverness so when they come up short on ideas they just throw big shit in. Game Night devolves into a story about Faberge eggs, private jets, chases, bloodthirsty criminal masterminds and mansions. None of this is necessary, it's just bigger and bigger shit to compensate for the hole at the middle of the story where originality should be.

A better movie would have stayed tight, within that cul-de-sac, within that butthole called upper-middle-class. Brooks should have made his fortune screwing guys like his brother out of their retirements. Then the brothers would have a real conflict. He should have been kidnapped by inept people just like Max, and had Max pitted against his own kind. Let's see how bloody, absurd and tense it could have all gotten. Or, go After Hours with it, surreal and unexpected. But the choices made are neither original nor clever. Just large.

I stopped counting the inconsistencies and gaps in logic that push this pile of shit to the finish line. The lonely cop next door gets involved, knows his neighbor is in trouble, but then has his own role-playing scheme that coincides? What the fuck? So many guns get dropped and scrambled for that the only explanation is both the good and bad guys are morons. Bad guys frequently stop just because good guys tells them to. It's just sloppy horseshit that a tighter script and a more disciplined director would have avoided.

Game Night also frequently comes to a screeching halt so that characters can have emotional resolutions that are forced and irrelevant. One pair who have been long-time lovers fight over who the wife might have slept with when they were briefly broken up, only to realize, duh, that it's not important. 

Max and Annie stop forward progress to squabble about babies. I don't want Max and Annie to have kids. They are dull assholes. I want them to keep to themselves, do whatever shitty jobs they have, buy a Camry with a V-6, and moonroof and leather. If they have a kid, they are only going to make life miserable for teachers and dream that someday their child might have a Camry too.

I'm sure the Camry is a nice enough car, but I don't want one. As long as I'm living vicariously through the movies, I want something more fun, less reliable and more dangerous. Game Night is about and for those who couldn't ever dream of anything more than a silver front wheel drive Toyota. Two Fingers.