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The new action comedy Date Night features a slew of whizzing bullets, two instances of breaking-and-entering, and one seriously in-shape super-spy played by the reliable Mark Wahlberg. The film, which concerns one New Jersey couple's nocturnal encounters with crooked cops, perverted politicians, drug addicts, and other creatures that call Manhattan home, hits its muscular, certifiably absurd climax with a car chase involving a taxi cab and a sports car with conjoined fenders.
This all sounds far more thrilling on paper than what ends up on screen. A more fitting metaphor for the film can be found in the chase's prelude where the two cars spin-out and stall in an attempt to free themselves. The guns, spy equipment, gyrating women, and scowling criminals are meant to divert your attention from what Date Night is: A boring movie made for boring couples who want to be told that not only is it okay to be boring, but it actually makes you better than everyone else.
The boring couple in question is Claire and Phil Foster (Tina Fey and Steve Carell), the terminally tired, utterly sexless middle-class parents of two children. Their panic buttons are pressed when another couple (Mark Ruffalo and Kristen Wiig) announce that they are getting a divorce; Wiig offers a singular wisp of bawdiness by telling Fey of her fantasies of being single. Rightfully shaken, Phil and Claire declare an emergency date to a snooty seafood restaurant in Soho. Of course, it's Phil's impulsive stealing of a dinner reservation that leads them into darkness and offers the film's most exhausted and morally stagnant joke.
The film's initial focus on Carell and Fey's chemistry is sufficiently charming, but it quickly becomes frantic when the pesky action plot rears its head. Director Shawn Levy insists on putting the pair, both bracing comedic presences on television, through rigorous set-pieces that simply don't fit their styles of humor. Admittedly, Fey seems more comfortable on-screen here than she did in the abysmal Baby Mama, but she (not unfairly) seems unenthused for a script, written by Josh Klausner, which lacks subtext, bite, or even cohesive storytelling.
Carell fares better, joke for joke, as the Fosters are chased around the Big Apple by a pair of cops (Common and Jimmi Simpson) working for both a corrupt DA (William Fichtner) and a scarcely present mafia boss (Ray Liotta). The Macguffin is a flash drive's bounty of compromising photos of the DA being held for ransom by a thief named Taste (James Franco) and his stripper girlfriend Whippit (Mila Kunis). A good cop, played by Taraji P. Henson, arrives to punish any party who fails to uphold good family values.
In its rekindled-passion plot and its cavalcade of misfits, Date Night suggests the neutered offspring of Martin Scorsese's After Hours and James Cameron's True Lies, which are near-polar opposites in terms of tone and craft. (They are also both immensely successful works in their own rights.) But the key to both of those works was their fearless attitude towards sex, a subject that Date Night avoids like a ravenous case of syphilis. The film plays like one loud, erratic excuse not to show, suggest, or even ponder an orgasm. All of which should work if you have yet to discover that the stork doesn't deliver the baby.
This all sounds far more thrilling on paper than what ends up on screen. A more fitting metaphor for the film can be found in the chase's prelude where the two cars spin-out and stall in an attempt to free themselves. The guns, spy equipment, gyrating women, and scowling criminals are meant to divert your attention from what Date Night is: A boring movie made for boring couples who want to be told that not only is it okay to be boring, but it actually makes you better than everyone else.
The boring couple in question is Claire and Phil Foster (Tina Fey and Steve Carell), the terminally tired, utterly sexless middle-class parents of two children. Their panic buttons are pressed when another couple (Mark Ruffalo and Kristen Wiig) announce that they are getting a divorce; Wiig offers a singular wisp of bawdiness by telling Fey of her fantasies of being single. Rightfully shaken, Phil and Claire declare an emergency date to a snooty seafood restaurant in Soho. Of course, it's Phil's impulsive stealing of a dinner reservation that leads them into darkness and offers the film's most exhausted and morally stagnant joke.
The film's initial focus on Carell and Fey's chemistry is sufficiently charming, but it quickly becomes frantic when the pesky action plot rears its head. Director Shawn Levy insists on putting the pair, both bracing comedic presences on television, through rigorous set-pieces that simply don't fit their styles of humor. Admittedly, Fey seems more comfortable on-screen here than she did in the abysmal Baby Mama, but she (not unfairly) seems unenthused for a script, written by Josh Klausner, which lacks subtext, bite, or even cohesive storytelling.
Carell fares better, joke for joke, as the Fosters are chased around the Big Apple by a pair of cops (Common and Jimmi Simpson) working for both a corrupt DA (William Fichtner) and a scarcely present mafia boss (Ray Liotta). The Macguffin is a flash drive's bounty of compromising photos of the DA being held for ransom by a thief named Taste (James Franco) and his stripper girlfriend Whippit (Mila Kunis). A good cop, played by Taraji P. Henson, arrives to punish any party who fails to uphold good family values.
In its rekindled-passion plot and its cavalcade of misfits, Date Night suggests the neutered offspring of Martin Scorsese's After Hours and James Cameron's True Lies, which are near-polar opposites in terms of tone and craft. (They are also both immensely successful works in their own rights.) But the key to both of those works was their fearless attitude towards sex, a subject that Date Night avoids like a ravenous case of syphilis. The film plays like one loud, erratic excuse not to show, suggest, or even ponder an orgasm. All of which should work if you have yet to discover that the stork doesn't deliver the baby.
