Somebody forgot to include jokes in their screenplay.
Money can buy you a lot of things that can make a movie better. Shelling out the top dollars will get you A-List comedians like Steve Carell and Tina Fey. It can allow you to cast great character actors like Mark Wahlberg, Ray Liotta, James Franco, and Mila Kunis in bit parts. It can allow you to shoot highly technical action sequences in primo New York spots like Times Square, Central Park, and FDR drive among others. It can get you fancy cars, gorgeous sets, and a stylized marketing campaign. It can get you perhaps anything you want in a comedy except the main ingredient: Jokes. You can’t buy laughs. This is because jokes have a very short shelf life. They can’t be told more than a couple of times before they lose all of their power. They have to be grown and cultivated. Some writer somewhere has to sit in a room, employ a little creativity and come up with something. This movie forgot that part of the process. It seems like it was built along a one-sentence pitch like, “Hey let’s put Steve Carell and Tina Fey in a movie together. Wouldn’t that be great.” Everyone agreed to make the movie way before the script was assigned to some schlub named Josh Klausner to crank it out over the weekend. It didn't need to be funny because the marketing campaign could capitalize on the actor's reputations for at least the first weekend gross. They aren't going to get me next time. Klausner’s next movie as a writer will be “Shrek Forever After.” I will remember not to see that one.
This movie employs a variation of what Roger Ebert lovingly calls an “Idiot Plot.” An “Idiot Plot” refers to the series of stupid misunderstandings that a couple in a romantic comedy will go through before they realize they love each other in the last scene of the movie. The idea is that if they just took a moment to sit down and talk about it then everything would be sorted out and fine. They don’t do this because then the movie would be five minutes, not a long drawn-out hour and a half. The Idiocy in this Plot has mostly to do with the actions of some very stupid and incompetent hit men and the retarded police who can’t seem to connect some fairly obvious dots. Carell and Fey play boring married couple (The Fosters) that gets in a case of mistaken identity after stealing a dinner reservation. The hit men take them into an alley, pull out guns, and ask them to provide an incriminating flash drive. To avoid getting shot, the old married couple tell the hit men that they hid the flash drive in a floorboard in the Boathouse in Central Park. (Does that sound like a believable story to you? I personally thought it was retarded.) As the hit men stare at the wooden floorboards in the Boathouse Carell sneaks up behind them and hits both of them with an oar. They are incapacitated for about 30 whole seconds as the old married couple makes their escape across the Pond in a boat that can’t go more than a couple mph. The hit men stumble out of the Boathouse and unload about five or six rounds of ammo at the row boat no more than 20 feet away. Not a single one gets anywhere close. The Fosters go to the police. A simple explanation is all that is required. But no, the Fosters spy the same hit men in the station as cops. So the Fosters don’t tell the officer that is questioning them anything. They high tail it out of there because they think the entire police station has been compromised. (It hasn’t). This is completely ludicrous but is completely necessary to the story. After all, if they did the logical thing the movie would be over in a couple of minutes.
Don’t get me wrong; I don’t usually require realism in comedies. (I just gave a good review to Hot Tub Time Machine.) What I do require though, is that a comedy be funny. If it isn’t funny, then it might as well be taken seriously. And if I’m taking something seriously, the unreality of the plot better not insult my intelligence. (If it’s funny it can do anything it wants.) But Date Night isn’t funny. I didn’t laugh more than three or four times the entire movie. It’s quite remarkable actually. Everything that ‘Hot Tub Time Machine’ the B-movie with the second rate cast did right, ‘Date Night’ the slick A-List movie gets completely wrong. For example, both movies employ a throw-up joke. If you want to know how to do that right, watch the former. “Date Night” does it all wrong. First of all it gives us plenty of warning. (Carell going “oh I’m going to throw up!) Then the actual throwing up takes far too long. (Carell does it once, then has to do it several more times). It wasn’t funny the first time because it breaks the 1st Rule of Shock Humor: The joke NEEDS to be UNEXPECTED. Otherwise there’s no shock. It’s just yucky. For the same reason it wasn’t funny the second or third time either. The whole thing lasts about thirty seconds, about 29 more than the audience needs to get the joke. This is not how you tell a throw-up joke. These people don’t know what they’re doing.
This pattern screws up the majority of the jokes in this movie. They will be fairly obvious in the first place and then that joke will be endlessly repeated as if the movie expects a punch line to get funnier upon each telling. There’s this bit where various side characters react with disgust at the Foster’s stealing of the reservation as if it is a huge social faux pa. After the second time, I could basically lip-sync what the next person would say the third, fourth, and fifth time. The movie is just one vacant scene followed by another. It’s a good thing Mark Wahlberg is shirtless during his entire performance because nobody in those scenes can tell a joke about anything else. If he put on a shirt, they would have nothing to say.
I will say one more thing. Action sequences can be funny if done right. Here they aren’t but yes theoretically it is possible. Sexy is never funny. I bring this up because the Fosters inexplicably find themselves in a brothel with a bunch of scantily clad strippers everywhere. Tina Fey has to get into a stripper costume and do some awkward dancing herself. I don’t recall laughing at any point. You know there is a reason that ’30 Rock’ goes to such incredible lengths to uglify Tina Fey when she plays Liz Lemon. It’s because it is very hard to laugh at someone who you are physically attracted to. Tina Fey is gorgeous. That’s why ’30 Rock’ puts her in glasses, has her walk funny, and gives her an eating disorder. It allows her to be funny because we aren’t thinking of other things. (For a very good example of this, take the SNL “Chippendales” sketch. Who is funnier: Patrick Swayze or Chris Farley?) For this reason, no comedy should ever present a truly sexed up scene. What inspires lust and what inspires laughter are completely different things. If your purpose is to make people laugh, then that scene will be a great yawning void in your movie. Welcome to Date Night.
A movie with Steve Carell and Tina Fey will never be all terrible. I liked the semi-serious scenes where they simply acted like the married couple that was trying in good faith to revitalize their marriage. These are the type of scenes that allow a critic to say the movie is a “comedy with heart.” Except here of course there is no comedy. Just a void with some heart. Anyway, those scenes allowed this movie to get a 2 star rating.
Added a couple days Later:
I have to add a caveat to what I said about sexy never being funny. There's always an exception to the rule, and that would be Marilyn Monroe. She had the ability to be sexy and hilarious at the same time. (Seven Year Itch, Some Like it Hot). I think the big reason for this is because she was always so oblivious of her effect on the men around her. In other words, she didn't know she was sexy. It's a very hard thing to pull off because it is so very absurd (and thus funny). As Marlon Brando in 'A Streetcar Named Desire" once quipped, "I never knew a woman who didn't know she was good looking without me having to tell her."
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