Review of Game Night (2018) by Tom Z — 10 Mar 2018

Game Night in a lot of ways should not have been as good as it was. Going in I thought it would be like every other average comedy film with a unique selling point. But from the first line of dialogue till the last joke this film surprised me, never waisting a moment to tell a joke through it's camera work, sound design, and the script. The basic premise is a group of friends who like playing games with one another are promised a "murder mystery" style night but little do they know that a group of real criminals kidnaped one of them instead. While the premise is funny enough the filmmakers go above and beyond to tell jokes. They don't just rely on the actors to improve something funny, there is care to set up a joke. Because of this miss understanding of the premise this leads to one person getting hurt. This is fine on its own but several times after this point the injury leads to more and more setups to more jokes later on. The film uses dramatic irony spectacularly leading to many moments of tense comedy as character pointed real guns in peoples faces without their knowledge or they totally disregard someone being kidnaped in front of them. Not only do we have funny scenarios and dialogue but the film makers also use the camera in humorous ways. In one way the camera is used to revival money being passed between characters in a humorous way. If this scene was done with a stranded shot reverse shot technique or just had the characters say home much money was being passed you would lose a lot of the feeling and tone of what make the joke work so well. Along with telling jokes with the camera we see many cleaver techniques used to reinforce the themes of the film. One such way was whenever there was an establishing shot or long shot the cinematographer, Barry Peterson, would use a tilt shift to make the subject look like a miniature. This is a cleaver way of reminding us about the gaming theme. But the camera doesn't just tell jokes it's also used in impressive ways like when it was used in a continuous shot in a chance scene where the characters played hot potato with a machuffin up and down a large mansion. If I had one complaint it would be that Lamorne Morris' and Kylie Bunbury's one joke they had throughout the movie didn't really help their characters. Every other character had jokes or scenarios that helped explore their character. While Lamorne Morris' and Kylie Bunbury's characters on the other hand argued about who slept with who which didn't tell the audience anything about themselves. This has everything to do with the script which makes me think it was added in to pad the film a bit. I would highly recommended this film especially if you like films like Clue.

Spoiler from here onwards.

When the characters go to Gary's house to play janga, Gary is framed in the shot by two guns pointing at him. Later in the film he is shot twice. This was a cleaver foreshadowing.