Vacation (2015) **

Vacation has a scene early in the film where Rusty (Ed Helms) and his family have a conversation where the main topic is a pretty much breaking the third wall, discussing how this Vacation will stand on its own and won’t need the previous vacation to work. While watching this scene the red flags shot up. And it turns out, those red flags that pop up from time to time are correct.

The plot of Vacation is exactly the same as its 1983 predecessor.  Rusty wants to take his family to Wally World to bring the family closer together. They run into comedic misadventures. They almost give up on the Wally World dream. There are notable changes, mainly in what the writers feel are upgrades from the original film. Instead of dog urine on a sandwich this film gives us swimming in raw sewage. Cousin Eddie has been replaced by the beefy weatherman brother-in-law. Of course most of these fall flat in the film, but they tried. Am I right?

Not really. This is pure paint by numbers that doesn’t have the heart of the original film. The biggest difference is between Ed Helms and Chevy Chase. Chevy Chase’s role of the family patriarch showed him as doing dumb things. Ed Helm’s version is playing him as a dumb individual. That’s the huge difference. Clark did some stupid things in the original film, but I don’t see him leading them to a swim in sewage. Which leads to a revelation during the last fifteen minutes of the film that just pops up, yet is fixed in the same scene. You could have made the film without this conflict and it would have been the same. The fact that this issue isn’t really presented during the film, even when dumb things are happening just insults the intelligence of the audience. It’s like introducing a character mentioned only in passing earlier in a mystery novel to play the villain. Bleh.

Vacation has a few laughs, put misses as a whole. Someone would be better off watching the original film in its place. There’s no real soul to this film. Probably the best part of the original film was that viewers could relate to going on vacations like the one shown in the film. This film is the exact opposite. It feels like a vacation that grew from a screenwriters head and not any kind of life experience. This is a flat remake.