Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
4/17/10
Very few movies are made
about nice people. Oh, the lead characters of most films are or want
to be good people, but if they were conventionally nice, they'd also be
so boring that nobody would want to sit and watch their story. Conflict,
after all, is the root of drama, and the nastier you are, the more likely
you are to find yourself hip-deep in it. Perhaps it has something
to do with how difficult it is for filmmakers to thrust trouble upon the
unsuspecting without a boatload of contrivance. Either way, Date
Night, the new comedy from Night at
the Museum director Shawn Levy, seems awfully novel just because it
has such an easy time taking two very nice people, creating conflict out
of the simple friction between their hopes and dreams and day-to-day reality,
and then launching them into an exciting, hilarious adventure with but
a simple step off the well-trodden road of their relentless goodness.
It helps that one of them is played by the movies' reigning master of comic
empathy, Steve Carell, and that writer Josh Klausner genuinely likes his
characters. Date Night is walking a familiar narrative path,
but does so in such delightful fashion, a tried-and-true formula feels
fresh and new. And that's very nice indeed.
Phil (Steve Carell) and Claire
Foster (Tina Fey) have been married for, oh, I don't know, maybe a hundred
years. Or at least so it seems from the drudgery of their daily routine
of keeping two kids and full-time jobs running. Trying to keep the
spark in their relationship, they go on regular “date nights”, but that
usually means a chaste dinner at a local restaurant followed by an early
bedtime. When their friends Haley (Kristin Wiig) and Brad (Mark Ruffalo)
reveal they're splitting up because all the passion's gone out of their
lives, Phil and Claire begin to privately fear they're looking at their
own future. So Phil insists that the next date night will be different:
a trip into Manhattan for dinner at the exclusive restaurant Claw.
Trouble is, you can't just walk into Claw and expect to get a table, but
opportunity presents itself when a reservation for “the Tripplehorns” goes
unclaimed. Phil steps in, declaring that he and Claire are that mysterious
couple, and all goes well from their overpriced table across from Will.i.am
until goons Armstrong (Jimmi Simpson) and Collins (Common) show up demanding
to speak to them outside. These two dangerous men want “the flash
drive” from the Tripplehorns, and they'll kill to get it. As a sympathetic
cop (Taraji P. Henson) tries to put the pieces together, the Fosters find
themselves on the run. Luckily, Claire once helped a superheroic
man of action (Mark Wahlberg) buy a house, but if the Fosters are going
to make it home to their kids, they're going to have to learn a few crimefighting
tricks of their own.
Date Night gets a
ton of comic mileage out of the fact that mild-mannered Phil and Claire
couldn't be less prepared for this adventure. I mean, holding a gun
on someone and demanding answers just seems so... rude! Swiping the
Tripplehorns' reservation is by far the most transgressive act of which
Phil is capable, and it's a funny running joke that no matter how fiendish
the people they run into, those scoundrels are always shocked to hear that
anyone would do such a thing. It's to Carell and Fey's credit that
not only do they make their characters so intensely likable, but they are
also able to perfectly pitch their struggle to find the courage to keep
going that I never stopped laughing with them at their awkward best stabs
at action heroism.
Any movie like this needs
an entertaining rogue's gallery of actors in the small roles, and Levy
has filled out his cast with stars happy to go all out in their couple
of scenes. The biggest such role belongs to Wahlberg, who's a perfect
choice for the Lethal Weapon Holbrooke because he exudes easy action star
charisma but also because he's so ridiculously chiseled, calm and confident
that the contrast between this guy who refuses to put on a shirt and Phil
(who tells him “Your pecs make me want to kill myself.”) is really potent.
James Franco and Mila Kunis are a delight as the “Tripplehorns”, scuzzy
criminals whose relationship problems nonetheless prove to be very familiar
to the Fosters. William Fichtner is wonderfully shameless as the
crusading District Attorney with a taste for strippers who carries a broom
with him everywhere (“What does he need that for?!?” an alarmed Claire
asks deep in the bowels of a strip club). Leighton Meester makes
the most of a couple scenes as the babysitter who relishes the chance to
squeeze her employers for extra money as the situation grows more grave.
Henson, Simpson and Common get the job done in the more serious roles,
persuading us that there's real danger in play.
But all of that would just
be window dressing if Carell and Fey couldn't make us care about the Fosters,
and they're really great. Nobody can be a doofus one minute and glow
with warmth and courage the next like Carell can, and the dorky but loyal
Phil fits him like a glove. I hadn't seen much of Fey outside of
Saturday Night Live, but she does a wonderful job of making Claire
lovably naive (“I have one question, and please don't judge me, but what
is a flash drive?”) but also very perceptive about the way she and Phil
are slowly sliding from loving couple to “excellent roommates”. The
end credits do both actors' method a service by showing one take after
another as they improvise their way around scenes looking for new angles
and jokes.
Klausner really knows how
to run this plot, leaning on making the lead characters likable, the supporting
ones memorable and not making the plot any more complicated than it needs
to be to keep the Fosters on the run. Levy stages it all with a smooth
hand, letting his actors play and making the one time he goes bananas on
the spectacle count: a bravura car chase with Phil and Claire behind
the wheels of two cars with their bumpers locked together, he driving backwards
and she forwards with the bad guys in pursuit. Most of the story's
energy is put into making the Fosters do things outside their very narrow
comfort zones, like breaking and entering, trying to menace the bad guys
with a gun (“Honey, I think you're losing control of the room”), and seducing
the sleazy DA by, well, doing The Robot.
In short, the genius of Date
Night lies mostly in its economy: it's not desperate to tickle
or thrill, really trusting its' characters to both engage us and make us
laugh. This kind of fish-out-of-water action comedy is a very reliable
genre when done right, and there's very little Date Night doesn't
do right. Let Holbrooke have the franchise: the Fosters have
each other, and that's a nice tale to be told. |
