Vacation

Get ready to have your memories and nostalgic warm feelings exploited! Why do we say that so often about movies made these days?

Ed Helms stars as Rusty Griswold – Clark’s beloved son who is all grown up and leading a family of his own. Even though he is a pilot for a discount airline, Rusty and the family don’t do much traveling beyond their summer vacation to a small, humble Michigan cabin (humble is another way to say dumpy).

After hearing about his wife’s, Debbie (Christina Applegate), dissatisfaction with the annual pilgrimage, Rusty decides to spice up the Memorial Day vacation by driving the family across the country to Walley World, just like his Dad (Chevy Chase) did years ago.

Will this vacation turn out to be as disastrous as that one?

At least, that Vacation was funny.

This Vacation exactly is what you feared it would be – a pale imitation trying to exploit everything you loved about the first one to fool you into thinking it might make you laugh all night long. However, the only way you will laugh all night long is if you are the world’s biggest fan of lame and failed humor.

As written by writers/directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Dailey, Vacation has some giggle worthy moments, but the movie flops as they try to make it into a gross out, outrageous R-rated comedy. They don’t provide enough material to make a movie like that work.

It’s not madcap enough.

It’s not farcical enough.

They needed to double or triple the jokes.

Instead, Goldstein and Dailey wander from joke to joke without any strong thread running through the movie to tie it together like the original. This leaves us with a failed climax.

Since the movie is limping along, we shouldn’t be surprised this trip to Walley World ends anti-climactically, but the failure to escalate the intensity and comic tragedy leads to a flat, meaningless ending, even if they do pull on your memory with allusions to the first one. Sadly, Goldstein and Dailey couldn’t keep up that running gag of referring to the first movie and the absurdity of the new Vacation.

You’ll get some good giggles from Steele Stebbins, who portrays the youngest son of Rusty and Debbie. I can’t help but laugh at a foulmouthed minor child, and Stebbins delivers his vulgarity with the right amount of anger and sarcasm to make it work, but he can’t save this movie.

Worst of all, this Vacation lacks heart. Helms goofily tries to inject glee into the film, but he isn’t given the material to show he is a dedicated family man or why. You should never doubt why he is putting his family through this stretch of bad luck (which should be much much worse to make it funnier and more effective).

If you ever watched the original, you know Chase and the gang did a better job of making that case.

Vactation is rated R for crude and sexual content and language throughout, and brief graphic nudity.