All of those perils undermine Vacation, a comedy that retraces the highway so memorably navigated 32 years ago by Chevy Chase, Beverly D'Angelo and their oddball relations in National Lampoon's Vacation. John Hughes' original screenplay (based on a short story he wrote for National Lampoon magazine) tapped into a shared primordial experience — the family road trip — and draped upon it hilariously wild exaggerations of every common mishap: weird relatives, unfriendly locals, underbudgeted expenses, cramped quarters, cheap motels … and getting lost time after time after time.
Like father (Chevy Chase), like son (Ed Helms): the Griswolds know how to take a vacation.
Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection
The original Vacation also benefited from two stars at the height of their powers. Chase's Clark Griswold was congenitally clumsy and socially awkward; D'Angelo's Ellen packed a powerful combination of sexiness and laugh-out-loud funniness. In this update, Clark and Ellen's son, Rusty (Ed Helms), decides to treat his brood to a reprise of the Griswold family's cross-country trek to Walley World — a fanciful blend of Disneyland and Six Flags that, as we all recall, was closed the last time the family pulled into the parking lot.
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Helms is fine as Rusty, occasionally displaying quirks and phrasing that a son of Clark might well have inherited. As his wife, Debbie, Christina Applegate engages in the sort of physical comedy that would have been assigned to Chase in an earlier day.
Skyler Gisondo, as the couple's endearing older son, James, adopts a perpetually pained expression, sweetly portraying that "I think I'm in the wrong family" vibe common to adolescents. The problems arise with the younger son, Kevin, played by Steele Stebbins. As a sign of the times, perhaps, the writers have decided that the more dirty words you stuff in a child's mouth, the funnier he becomes. So we have this little kid — all of 8 years old, maybe? — dropping f-bombs all over the landscape and terrorizing his good-natured older brother. (A plastic-bag-over-the-head gag is deemed so hilarious that it's repeated at least twice). Even before the family leaves Chicago, the audience longs for them to visit a bar-soap factory and feed Junior a few samples.
Vacation riffs on many of the original's themes, with mixed results. Clark's beloved Family Truckster station wagon (which, along with Chase and D'Angelo, makes a cameo appearance) is replaced by a visually hilarious European import with a button-jammed key fob the size of an iPad. A gag that evokes Clark's long-ago encounter with a sports car-driving Christie Brinkley, on the other hand, got a much better send-up in 1997's Vegas Vacation. And as in the original and its three sequels, it's always grand to hear Lindsey Buckingham's fantastic Vacation theme song over the big theater speakers.
Vacation is funniest when it departs from the original. A nighttime scene at the Four Corners Monument — where cops from Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah end up pulling guns on one another while hurling jingoistic insults — is funny not only as part of the film's narrative, but also for smartly poking fun at the political divides of 2015 America.
Similarly, the family's disastrous river-rafting trip with an emotionally damaged guide (Charlie Day from TV's It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) touches on modern-day adventure travelers' penchant for entrusting their lives to complete strangers.