Review of Rough Night (2017) by Walter%20 S — 21 Jun 2017

Dark comedy seems to be something that has seceded out of the mainstream as of late, much to my disappointment. As a result, it's a bit surprising that a studio comedy like Rough Night would have such an amount of it.

It's too often that blue humor is mistaken for black humor, but this movie manages to know the difference for a majority of its runtime. Similarly, it knows the difference between sexual jokes and sexualized jokes, and the actors, despite their varying amounts of material to work with, play it well.

It makes for something consistently funny for the first 70 minutes or so, it eventually becomes so messy and drawn out that it goes farther and farther down, just like a dead stripper. Jess (Scarlett Johansson) is about to get married to Peter (co-writer Paul W.

Downs). Going to Miami with her college friends Alice (Jillian Bell), Frankie (Ilana Glazer), Blair (Zoë Kravitz), and Australian study abroad pal Pippa (Kate McKinnon) for the former's bachelorette party, they rent a super-nice house and a stripper.

However, Alice accidentally kills the stripper while trying to engage him, and the five result to trying to hide the body from prying eyes, including next door swingers Pietro (Ty Burrell) and Lea (Demi Moore).

If it all sounds ridiculous, it's because it obviously is. It isn't the most original concept (i.e. Very Bad Things and Weekend at Bernie's upon a few more), but this isn't the type of movie that takes itself seriously in the slightest, and that's all for the better.

Its script, written by Downs and director Lucia Aniello, keeps the turns up the silliness to avoid leaving a sour taste in the viewer's mouth, and while it may prove to be a bit too cruel for some, I was happily surprised by the levity that runs throughout.

It's generally well paced but sometimes a bit too fast, and the moments in which the movie cuts back to Peter and his ironically tame bachelor party feel disconnected from the A-story. I didn't really mind for a while, though, given that a comedy is supposed to make the viewer laugh, and I laughed quite a lot--definitely more than I anticipated doing so.

The actors generally play what they usually do, but Johansson's comedic skills acted as a reminder that she's often underused in such a manner, and her approach to playing the straight character adds more shading than what could have happened in another actor's hands.

Where Rough Night falls apart is in the last 25 to 30 minutes. That aforementioned levity starts to float into the stratosphere to a point where the filmmakers can't quite bring it back down, and the messiness of trying to actually tell a story makes it clear that they started making it up as they went along, unable to bring themselves out of the hole of debauchery that they had so deeply thrown themselves into.

It begins to get repetitive and a bit exhausting, and dare I say unfunny. It's not that long--it's 101 minutes--but it should have been no more than 85 given how thin the plot is. In the end, it proves to be pretty forgettable, and while there are laughs to be had, the underlying unevenness eventually bubbled up until Rough Night becomes rough indeed, and a bit of a shitshow at times.

I'm not too sure that the people behind Broad City were quite ready to work in a feature-length medium since it does prove to feel like a stretched-out sketch, and the resolution feels tacked on. I appreciate the fact that it sticks to its guns both in tone and content, but too much of the same thing can eventually lead to dull hangover.

6.4/10, okay, C+, average, etc.