VEGAS VACATION
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1997 Scott Renshaw
(Warner Bros.) Starring: Chevy Chase, Beverly D'Angelo, Randy Quaid, Ethan Embry, Marisol Nichols. Screenplay: Elisa Bell. Producer: Jerry Weintraub. Director: Stephen Kessler. MPAA Rating: PG (profanity, adult themes) Running Time: 92 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
It's tough to say who has been part of more fiascos in the past fifteen years: the VACATION series' Clark Griswold, or Chevy Chase. Personal problems and terrible choices in film projects -- dreadfully comedies like FLETCH LIVES, NOTHING BUT TROUBLE and COPS AND ROBBERSONS -- have turned Chase into a poster boy for unfulfilled career potential, and lately it seems that he is trying so hard to win back his audience's good will that it simply comes off as pathetic. His latest attempt to re-animate the corpse of his film career -- a return for a fourth draw from the successful VACATION well -- probably seemed like a good idea at the time, and the film isn't a complete disaster. It's simply so lacking in attempts at humor that Chase might have had a better chance at coming up with a winner playing a slot machine.
Chase once again plays Clark Griswold, hapless patriarch of Chicago's Griswold clan: wife Ellen (Beverly D'Angelo), daughter Audrey (Marisol Nichols) and son Rusty (Ethan Embry). With a freshly-earned bonus burning a hole in his pocket, Clark decides to take the family on another vacation adventure, this time to the new family entertainment Mecca of Las Vegas. Naturally, nothing goes quite according to plan for Clark. While he is busy losing his shirt at every possible game, Ellen becomes infatuated with Wayne Newton (Himself), whose feelings may be mutual. Even worse, Cousin Eddie (Randy Quaid) and his family turns out to be living in the nearby desert, bringing even more bad luck too bear on the Griswolds. Meanwhile, Rusty parlays a fake I.D. into a glimpse of the high life, and Audrey learns some bad habits from Eddie's daughter Vicki (Shae D'Lyn).
After fourteen years and three previous films, the VACATION series has been around long enough to be the target of some in-jokes, and a couple of the film's best gags are based on familiarity with 1983's NATIONAL LAMPOON'S VACATION at the very least. Early in the film, Clark laments a lack of family time together by noting to the kids, "I hardly recognize you any more;" after four different actors have played both Audrey and Rusty, it's not surprising. There is also a cameo appearance by Christy Brinkley, once again playing Clark's sports car-driving object of desire, only now with a baby on board.
Unfortunately, the series has also been around long enough for the audience to expect a certain level of outrageousness and wild sight gags a la series creator John Hughes, and VEGAS VACATION simply limps along for much of its 92 minutes. Chase can still make incompetence an art form, and he gets a couple of amusing bits in an airplane bathroom and trying to plug leaks in the Hoover Dam with chewing gum. The truth is that many of the actual jokes in VEGAS VACATION are funny; there are just stretches of minutes at a time when there isn't even an attempt at a joke to be found. The film gets particularly tedious when it follows the exploits of Audrey and Rusty (played with a transcendental blandness by Nichols and Embry), but it's not much better trying to turn Wayne Newton into a comic actor. Screenwriter Elisa Bell has set a film in one of the easiest cities in the country to make fun of, yet she seems unable to come up with anything funny to say about it. In fact, between the sluggish script and the extended sequences showing off the Vegas sights and observing a Siegfried and Roy show, you'd think that VEGAS VACATION had been commissioned by the Nevada Chamber of Commerce.
The biggest surprise in VEGAS VACATION turns out to be that after over an hour of snooze-inducing nonsense, it comes up with one of the most purely inspired comic sequences of the last few years. With Clark nearly broke and desperate to make back the thousands of dollars he has lost to a black jack dealer (played with delightful smugness by Wallace Shawn), he walks into a second-rate casino which allows gambling on some more familiar games: Flip a Coin, Rock Paper Scissors, the children's card game War. I was nearly in tears laughing as a stone-faced croupier at the "I'm Thinking of a Number Between 1 and 10" table informed Clark that 7 was incorrect, then almost immediately angry that a fraction of that imagination hadn't gone into the rest of the film. All that remained was for VEGAS VACATION to trot out the obligatory car crash and finish up with another ten minutes worth little more than a shrug. For five minutes, VEGAS VACATION is a hilarious parody of the gambling culture of Vegas; for five minutes, Chevy Chase was back on top. Perhaps those five minutes can serve as a launching pad to better choices. But I wouldn't bet on it.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 crap games: 5.
Visit Scott Renshaw's MoviePage http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw Subscribe to receive reviews directly via email See details on the MoviePage
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews