John Cena is the Tom Cruise of wrestling. He doesn’t have human emotions, but rather does some sort of calculation in his head regarding short and long-term planning and how it will position his bank account and his career. When he attempts comedy, there is no abandon, no joy, no doing something just because it’s funny. There are just performances whose goal is part of a scheme to promote himself.
Great comedy comes from conviction, commitment to the gag. Like, say, when I worked at All-American Video, and I removed a tape and took a dump inside the box of some Jenna Jameson movie back in the adult room. I didn’t do that to advance my career. I did it because I truly believed in it. I knew it was funny, and visualized the customer going home, getting out his Vaseline, settling into a greasy, threadbare recliner only to find that instead of naked, meth-addled sex abuse survivors he had my fecal matter. “A boxful of shit?!?” he’d exclaim. “This is hilarious! Bravo to the staff at All-American Video!”
Two things: 1) that gag didn’t get the result I expected, but that’s the risk you take when you commit. The customer had no sense of humor; 2) You can bet your ass John Cena has never shat in a porn jewel case before.
What Cena does is commerce. He isn’t funny. I’m sure he has a shitload of managers and PR people working very hard to convince us otherwise. But his attempts are soulless and fake, approximations of what he has observed, shaped carefully by some grander scheme.
The grassfuckers in Hollywood don’t care whether they put funny people in their comedies. They care about selling the product, meaning they hope we’re dumb enough to buy jokes, all the while they are dumb enough to buy the horseshit being sold by Cena’s handlers.
Cena has made a string of generally bland “comedies” in search of success. The latest of which, Vacation Friends, is free on Hulu. Free, that is, if you see your neighbor’s password on a pad of paper on their coffee table. For the rest of you, I don’t know what things like this cost. $10 a year, I’m guessing. Only a fucking idiot would pay more than that, right? I mean, three BuzzBalls give you more entertainment than a year’s worth of this warmed-over garbage.
Anyway, I sat through all of Vacation Friends. It has no nutritional value, breaks no ground, does nothing original and plays it ridiculously safe ad predictable for a story about a strait-laced couple, Marcus and Emily (Lil Rel Howery and Yvonne Orji), who get entangled with two wild partiers, Ron and Kyla (Cena and Meredith Hagner). It was written, produced, directed, and acted by people with their eye on some other ball, not the one in their hands. Meaning, it’s a product designed by people who don’t give a shit about it but think they’ve got the audience figured out. Just give them a little of this, a little of that and they’ll eat it up.
A young couple go to Mexico for a vacation where Marcus plans to propose. He’s an uptight dude and wants everything to be perfect. His plans are ruined from the first moment by the obnoxious, loud free spirits Ron and Kyla. Soon enough, the movie plots to bring them all together, and Marcus and Emily learn to relax and let down their guard, to go with the flow, to take drugs, get drunk, crash boats, shoot guns at each other and have group sex (NOT shown).
As soon as the vacation is over, though, Marcus and Emily need to get back to their real life, their perfect wedding, and uptight families. They try to forget Ron and Kyla, until the wild ones crash the wedding.
Pre-programmed hilarity ensues. And through the crafted chaos, Marcus and Emily–Marcus in particular–learn to let go, to trust others, and that everything will be okay. Every stupid fucking thing that Ron and Kyla do somehow turns magically delicious and wonderful. Pawning the wedding rings? It works out! Taking mushrooms during a fox hunt? Perfect!
Vacation Friends is a story where there would be no trouble, except that brought on the free spirits, who are then rewarded for wiggling out of the mess they make. Maybe if the transformation of Marcus didn’t feel so fake and plotted, you could accept that. And maybe, if the characters weren’t so fucking one-note and grating, it would be possible to give a rat’s wet ass.
They aren’t, though. Howery’s Marcus is never more than an annoying whiner. The acting is poor, but the monotony of his actions is worse. Orji isn’t given nearly enough to do, but she does look really fucking good in a swimsuit. Cena dominates the screen, but like I said before, he’s a soulless conniver, never actually funny and looking more like a used car salesman who was told he’d get the sale if he made you laugh. Hagner would be more suited to Hallmark movies or as the ditzy neighbor on a sitcom who delivers a couple funny lines each episode and then disappears.
The plot is just a series of mishaps that don’t escalate, really. Each is a disaster, and each ends up having a silver lining. Of the four main characters, only Marcus changes, and that’s just the formula. Ron and Kyla, who are fucking assholes redeemed only through luck, learn zero lessons, because that’s too hard a message for Hollywood to script.
In real life, asshole behavior eventually catches up with you. Remember that customer at All-American Video who didn’t like my hilarious joke? Well, when he called to complain, I answered and pretended to be my manager, Dipshit Suzanne. That was easy, you just had to talk while biting your tongue, and lower your voice. Anyway, I locked his account so he could no longer rent from us and would have to drive like ten miles to the next nearest video store with porn. I also put a fee on his account, noting he did not rewind my poo before returning it. He probably learned his lesson. As it should have been.
One Finger for Vacation Friends. Trust me, you have better things to do than this.