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 Cousin Eddie has been replaced by the beefy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.
