Review of Game Night (2018) by Rebecca H — 09 Mar 2018

All the positive reviews praising this movie as a smart, fast paced dark comedy are mystifying. Is somebody getting paid for positive reviews? A Coen Brothers project this is not. No quirky, but insightful anti heroâs here.

This terrible mishmash mediocre characters and incredible, tortured plot twists repeatedly insults the audienceâÂÂ(TM)s intelligence. The dog and his creepy owner steal the scenes with the biggest laughs.

Continuity breaks and lazy writing shortcuts abound and make one suspect that someone hoped if they threw in enough car chases no one would notice the bad writing. BatemanâÂÂ(TM)s character gets shot through the arm, it never gets a tourniquet, or bandaging but he never bleeds out and spends the rest of the film using the arm with no problem.

McAdams perky yoga instructor is just plain annoying and dumbed down to such a degree that she dances around with a loaded gun, puts it in her mouth and never notices itâÂÂ(TM)s the real thing. And who wouldnâÂÂ(TM)t notice an exit hole? Apparently competitive stress can cause infertility and the relationship between these two is based on their mutual passion for winning any game at any cost.

But that conflict is never developed. The one dimensional police officer neighbor has some good lines, but weâÂÂ(TM)re supposed to believe that he has an all access home link to some master national database containing every known criminal alias and address.

ItâÂÂ(TM)s not smart enough to be satire and the sappy sentimentality of the ending ruins the dark comedy claim. This is just another collection of dumb cheap laughs in the vein of Horrible Bosses or Wedding Crashers.

About 80 minutes in I was looking at my watch wondering when the real bad guy would finally get neutralized in the predictable way and it would finally be over.