Vacation (2015)

You'll quite possibly have seen a Chevy Chase fronted National Lampoon family movie in your film viewing history, perhaps even 1983's original, National Lampoon's Vacation. Probably most well known for National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989), a rip-roaring, insane, and thoroughly enjoyable Christmas caper, the series has spawned a couple of more than adequate entries, including Vegas Vacation (1997), one that this critic has a particular soft spot for. This 2015 reboot of the series, starring Ed Helms as Clark Griswald's (Chevy Chase) son Russell, alongside Christian Applegate as his wife Debbie, is one of the worst films I have ever seen. Retreading the exact same story as the 1983 original, Russell decides to take the family on the exact same road trip to Walley World amusement park that he experienced as a child, spanning several days of driving, and inevitably everything going wrong. To do this, Russell 'Rusty' Griswald hires a complicated Albanian SUV, that comes with several 'brilliant' features including one that prevents the doors shutting if something is in the way. He demonstrates this by putting his arm in the door, and telling his wife to attempt to slam the door shut. I wonder what happens? It's even funnier when he asks his wife to do it a second time. The family takes in several detours on the way, each one more unwanted than the last (by both the rest of the family and the audience) including one where they pass the campus where Debbie was a student, that happens to be hosting a sorority party in the very house Debbie lived as they're driving by. For reasons unknown, they stop and chat to the scantily clad girls, who realise that they're talking to 'Debbie Do Anything' an apparent legend of sorority folklore. To prove she's not a prude and isn't old, Debbie attempts the assault course in front of her with 'hilarious' results. Chris Hemsworth pops up for an utterly unwanted and unneeded cameo that results in Rusty killing a cow with a Ride On Lawnmower, before the family take a trip down the Grand Canyon on a water raft in another mind numbing sequence, at which point I was begging the film to end and put me out of my rapidly increasing misery. The relationship between the Griswald's two boys is embarrassingly unamusing. Fourteen year old James is shy and awkward, and is bullied throughout by his sadistic twelve year old brother Kevin, who is simply put, just a twat, and a truly unfunny one to boot. Their reversed relationship is supposed to be a key comic trope of the film, but both of them are just indescribably annoying. One scene in which Rusty tries to talk to James about how to chat up a girl is unwantedly crass and leads to more exchanges that leave the viewer stony faced, and furious that the film is being allowed to continue. It's not offensive, it's just contemptible. Helms' best film remains The Hangover (2009), which for all its flaws is an enjoyable romp and at times amusing comedy which still holds up fairly well today. For Applegate, Vacation almost makes you forget she was in Anchorman (2004) let alone the fact that she was terrific in it. I've never walked out of a film or turned one off (how you can call something shit if you haven't seen the whole thing) but this was a monumental struggle. The burning question to come from it was that I don't know who this film was made for. I genuinely want to know, who the fuck has watched Vacation and laughed once, let alone enjoy this appalling shit stain on the white sheet of film making? Sure, I often joke that people's attention spans are dwindling and that everyone's becoming more and more stupid as books are ignored in favour of taking a video of yourself in the mirror, talking about yourself and posting it on Tik Tok for the despairing, vain and narcissistic adulation from people (most of which you don't know and never will), but Vacation makes me believe that it's no longer a joke. The real and terrifying thought here, certainly more scary than anything you'll subject yourself to over this Halloween weekend, is that Vacation made $104.7 million worldwide, making you pray to God that those who went to the cinema to see it were under severe duress. There's a sequence in Vaction where the family attempts to visit a hot spring, only to be lead up a supposed shortcut (making me wish to God I was watching Rat Race [2001] a film with a vaguely similar scenario which makes it look like Man with a Move Camera [1929] in comparison to this heap of disease ridden flea foul) to a pool that they bathe in before realising they're swimming in a raw sewage dump. That raw sewage dump is something I would gladly dive into stark naked rather than sit through this egregious virus of a 'film', one that is so chronic, it almost glimpses the the final rung of Satan's own sewage pipe, where the gnarled and repellent remnants of How to Be Single (2016) lie, close enough for Vacation to smell, but thankfully for Helms and Applegate, so hateful that Vacation ultimately (and narrowly) escapes the title of worst film ever made. 0.6/10