Game Night (2018)
Directed by John Francis Daley
Max and Annie's weekly game night gets kicked up a notch when Max's brother Brooks arranges a murder mystery party -- complete with fake thugs and federal agents. So when Brooks gets kidnapped, it's all supposed to be part of the game. As the competitors set out to solve the case, they start to learn that neither the game nor Brooks are what they seem to be. The friends soon find themselves in over their heads as each twist leads to another unexpected turn over the course of one chaotic night.
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What critics say influenced Game Night
If you've seen " The Game " or other films in which an escapist adventure turns weird and frightening, you'll anticipate some but not all of the twists and turns of "Game Night," and you'll appreciate the way that the screenwriter and directors tie them to the psychology of the characters, and structure the film as a journey of personal as well as narrative discovery.
Game Night finds a bunch of boring suburban couples placed in what amounts to a comedic version of Fincher's 1997 thriller, The Game, with references to some of his other films such as Fight Club and Gone Girl sprinkled in like lollipops in a game of CandyLand.
Written by Mark Perez (Disney’s “The Country Bears”) and directed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein (“Vacation”), “Game Night’s” premise — a brother’s gift of a dangerous adventure that may or may not be real — is eerily similar to director David Fincher’s 1997 thriller, “The Game.”
Imagine the endless twists and turns and double-crossing of David Fincher’s rich-man-gets-kidnapped-for-fun-but-maybe-not? film The Game, told from the point of view of the kidnap victim’s best buds — and also, it’s, like, hilarious.
Game Night will certainly never be confused with Fincher's The Game , to which it basically owes its entire premise, but it still manages to visit some reasonably dark places.
Consciously, if quite superficially, the film is riffing on the twisty architecture of The Game —an amusing target for parody, given that David Fincher’s 1997 puzzle-box thriller is hardly a universally beloved touchstone.
Game Night finds a bunch of boring suburban couples placed in what amounts to a comedic version of Fincher's 1997 thriller, The Game, with references to some of his other films such as Fight Club and Gone Girl sprinkled in like lollipops in a game of CandyLand.
Ryan’s obsession with the idea that people are hosting fight clubs could be taken as an allusion to that, since “Fight Club” was Fincher’s follow-up to “The Game.”
For every sly shade at Skeet Ulrich (!!) and the Hulk franchise, there’s a groaner about Morgan Freeman and Fight Club.
No Fincher fanatic would confuse any of this for a shrewd imitation, but they’ll still recognize the ways that directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein ( Vacation ) nod to that revered perfectionist: with a Fight Club reference here, a Gone Girl unreliable-narrator gag there, and a sickly, slickly fluorescent visual palette throughout.
In a film crammed with rapid fire pop-culture references, of course the characters compare the pugilist party to Fight Club, Eyes Wide Shut and Django Unchained.
These people may have fallen down some rabbit hole of their own devising, but couldn't it be argued that we have as well, in a topsy-turvy world that finds its reflection onscreen, alongside references to Trump and racist websites, not to mention such diverse films as Django Unchained, Eyes Wide Shut , and Fight Club .
This one is equally funny, light on its feet and pop-culture savvy, with references to Taken, Pulp Fiction, The Green Mile, Iron Man and more, plus several layers of postmodern hoodwinking that balance deftly between tricksy and daft.
Don’t expect Liam Neeson Taken fist-fighting (frequently referenced), but both sides of the coin are played with a festive darkness that’s certainly not expected upon marketed perceptions.
That’s not to say that all thrillers are inherently boring, but rather something more akin to the Taken movies where it’s oddly comforting rather than something that would genuinely get our adrenaline pumping.
The film is an homage to the recent trend of “kidnapping” thriller movies over the past few years, such as Prisoners and Kidnap , but it takes most of its influence from the hit film franchise Taken.
Playing Scrabble and Jenga hasn’t prepped her for tracking down kidnappers, but movies have, and whether it’s the Taken series or the Quentin Tarantino oeuvre, there’s always a role to slip into.
The continued influence of Marvel has a lot to do with this, but the evolution of comedy into action spectacle really started with The Hangover in 2009.
Think The Hangover with far less drunkenness and slightly more murder.
Except, this time around, the premise actually has some legs and could go to some even wilder places — you know, like The Hangover series, only without the implausibility.
Not likely to break any new ground like some of its R-rated peers such as “The Hangover,” “Bridesmaids” or “Girls Trip,” “Game Night” remains fresh simply for being a crude-yet-sweet mainstream comedy for the middle-aged crowd that doesn’t belittle their intelligence.
- "Game Night" is a groan-inducing, face-palming, did-I-really-just-see/hear-that comedy in the tradition of "The Hangover," "Neighbors" and "Horrible Bosses."
The subsequent bro-driven, smart-stupid, and very profitable salad days of Knocked Up, Superbad, and The Hangover led to the critical and commercial apex of Bridesmaids and the ascendancy of Melissa McCarthy, and continued into a long denouement, as Hollywood repeatedly reconfigures the same handful of elements all the way to 2018 — with notably diminishing returns.
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"Game Night" shifts into a full-throttle, all-night action thriller, something akin to Martin Scorsese's "After Hours" on nitrous oxide.
In a comic movie tradition that goes from “Date Night,” “After Hours” to Neil Simon’s “The Out-of-Towners,” this nice suburban couple find themselves venturing out into the dark side of the city, trading bullets with bad guys, infiltrating an underground fight club, and trying to get bloodstains out of an adorable little dog’s fur.
Screenwriter Mark Perez (Accepted, Herbie Fully Loaded) has engineered a deliciously anarchic scenario that plays out like the haphazard, devil-may-care composite of fellow subversively absurdist comedies like Into the Night, Adventures in Babysitting, Risky Business, After Hours and Date Night, while directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein handle all the chaos and calamity with confidence and flair.
Granted, they all take it seriously enough to sell the tension — and yes, there is a tension (think about the time-displaced angst of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours) — but it’s apparent early on that everyone’s chewing up the scenery as part of the genre-bending fun.
In a Rube Goldberg caper like this one, with its roots in glide-through-the-dark-side comedies like “After Hours,” it’s all about the execution — about how writing, directing, and acting fuse with a timing just nimble enough to be funny and implausibly convincing.
While it’s a formula that can be brilliant and/or fun (see: everything from “After Hours” to “Adventures in Babysitting”), recent efforts have seemed to result in features that feel more like extended Saturday Night Live sketches — a gimmick stretched far past its worth and padded with some car chases and contrived heart.
The very funny “Game Night” belongs to the comedy sub-genre of People Think They’re Pretending But It’s Actually Real, a class that includes such fine entries as “Three Amigos,” “Galaxy Quest” and “A Bug’s Life” (which are all the same movie, as you know), plus “Tropic Thunder” and the under-appreciated Bill Murray entry “The Man Who Knew Too Little.”
Plot-wise, it’s still sort of stale, delivering a familiar premise (okay, I guess we haven’t all seen the underrated ’90s Bill Murray comedy The Man Who Knew Too Little, of which Game Night seems like a remake right down to the more successful brother’s role in setting up an immersive theater mystery game that gets confused with a coincidental real crime occurring at the same time).
Of course, in the style of The Man Who Knew Too Little or, uh … Rough Night, a real-life crime intrudes on the supposed performance, sending a bunch of fragile-ego softies out on a flailing rescue mission.
There was a similar comedy premise over 20 years ago in The Man Who Knew Too Little.
None is funnier than McAdams, who gets to hilariously act out the hostages in the diner opening to “Pulp Fiction,” never realizing she’s waving a real gun at real bad guys who really need to be taken hostage.
I think I can tell you that Game Night officially won me over when Annie -- needing to intimidate a bar filled with criminals using a gun that she thinks is fake -- does a terrible impersonation of Honey Bunny from Pulp Fiction.
This one is equally funny, light on its feet and pop-culture savvy, with references to Taken, Pulp Fiction, The Green Mile, Iron Man and more, plus several layers of postmodern hoodwinking that balance deftly between tricksy and daft.
McAdams jumps at the chance to play a Pulp Fiction-esque scoundrel and dance to a little Third Eye Blind.
There are amusements found in a one-take Faberg egg game of hot potato, Batemans passive-aggression and McAdams going Pulp Fiction with a pistol she thinks is a toy.
Max and Annie, playing along, still think it’s all just a game; there’s a very funny scene of the two of them jokily threatening the kidnappers in a dive bar, spouting speeches from “Pulp Fiction” and twirling a loaded pistol like a water gun.
In a film crammed with rapid fire pop-culture references, of course the characters compare the pugilist party to Fight Club, Eyes Wide Shut and Django Unchained.
Our team of gamesters infiltrate this endless sprawling lair, and the sequence that follows, which includes a human dog fight staged for the benefit of rich people, suggests “Eyes Wide Shut” crossed with “Fight Club” (references that the movie is knowing enough to make about itself), climaxing in a roundelay of Fabergé egg–tossing all done in a one seemingly endless shot.
There's a madcap car chase, a violent incident that leads to impromptu surgery, and a house party with echoes of the masked spectacle in " Eyes Wide Shut ," but it's all entwined with commentary about aging, disappointment, doomed romanticism and sibling rivalry.
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They even apply some subtlety to the jokes (like not showing the bodily fluids) and that pays off beautifully in a scene that involves a bullet extraction that is reminiscent of Hong Kong director Stephen Chow‘s spy comedy, From Beijing With Love .
It’s not that I was hoping for a dramatic adult turn akin to what Jonathan Demme gave us in his marvelous 1986 adventure “Something Wild,” but “Game Night” is nothing less than a live-action cartoon.
The dark humor and action twists of “Game Night” are reminiscent of a throwback to retro 80s movies like “Something Wild” and “Romancing the Stone,” films that combined comedy, mystery, action, and romance but with a slightly more ominous tone.