After a string of misfires like Baywatch and The House, Rough Night joins the elite group of summer comedies that are less than the sum of their parts.
After a summer of comedic duds featuring some of the most compelling talent working in Hollywood, writer and director Lucia Aniello’s feature debut appears to be the final nail in the coffin. Or at least, you would hope so. Rough Night isn’t a terrible film, nor even a completely unfunny comedy, but it makes its 95 minute runtime really drag; which is in no small part due to the fact that it is incredibly predictable. Not a crime in itself unless what you’re going for is shock value and crassness, which Rough Night most definitely is.
I won’t claim to be very knowledgeable of the TV show Broad City, from which Aniello and stars Ilana Glazer and Paul W. Downs (both also writers and producers for the show) gained notoriety, because why would anyone lie about that but I’m guessing that in order for it to be as popular as it is then it has to be a lot funnier, and original, than what Rough Night turned out as.
It’s hard not to view the film through lens of it being a “female comedy” because you very much get the impression that the film wants you to make that distinction. The premise alone, of a bachelorette party gone horribly wrong to the point of manslaughter, invites comparison between masculinity and femininity; with Scarlett Johansson’s A story of debauchery and hijinks being intercut with fiancee Downs’ B story of a quiet winetasting devolving into paranoia over the girls’ actions.
It’s here that you begin to notice the film’s main flaw which is that nearly every character is one note and the notes aren’t particularly funny. They’re not really offensive, they’re just kind of lazy and you often find yourself looking for punchlines that aren’t there. It treads that line that so many modern comedies do of repeating the same cheap and sexist humour of yesteryear but only this time there’s a character who acknowledges the joke was wrong, and then they move on. Downs’ genteel night with the boys in an oak furnished sitting room feels like a riff on gender expectations until you realise that him being effeminate and emotional is the joke.
Similarly, Kate McKinnon, who gives what might be the only really funny performance in the entire film, plays an Australian. That’s it. She’s Australian and Australians say things slightly different to Americans. That’s the joke. McKinnon’s talented enough to make the oddball mannerisms of the character work (she’s basically doing the world’s best Toni Collette impression) but, a lot like Glazer’s protest bum who’s funny because she spouts social justice slogans while being skeezy and unreliable, it mostly verges on hateful stereotyping.
Of course, the point of an ensemble production is often to have each member of the core team work symphonically, their one notes complementing one another, which is unfortunately not the case with Rough Night. Glazer and Zoe Kravitz, for example, play former lovers meeting again after some time with very different lifestyles, one stuck in her activist youth while the other has become an affluent mother stuck in the middle of a bitter divorce. It’s very easy to see how those pieces are going to fit together as soon as the characters meet again but you at least expect there to be some humourous insight, or witty back and forths, between the two but no. Not really. The characters and plot never quite feel like they’re progressing naturally, they just kind of jump to where they need to be at that moment in time.
The only marginally three dimensional characters are Scarlett Johansson’s lead and Jillian Bell, who plays the loud and jealous best friend whom Johansson has been spending less and less time with. You can probably guess where the plot goes with this one and the third act “all-is-lost” and “resolution” moments are indeed as cookie-cutter as they come. To return to the promise of the cast and the producers, Rough Night really does feel like a film written according to checklists in a screenwriting handbook.
It also has a critical lack of self-awareness. It’s hard to say if the film was meant to be some kind of New York feminist victory lap after a presumed Hillary Clinton win (Broad City’s creators and actors were big Clinton supporters, even having her appear on the show in the run up to the 2016 election) which now just feels awkward, but it would be one of the few explanations as to why Johansson’s character sports the short Clinton hairdo and is running for public office even though it has no bearing on the plot of the film and adds absolutely nothing to it.
It doesn’t increase the sense of urgency, being convicted for manslaughter or murder is enough, and it never ties back into anything in the story. Her character is just running for State Senate. That’s her thing. She’s that one friend everyone has in their group that’s running for the State Senate. It’s not weird, it’s just pointless and it adds to this kind of cliched gumbo effect.
Most of the roles and relationships are cardboard cutouts but the actors themselves (very sadly, given their very apparent comedic chops) feel expendable. Almost as if the parts were written for other actors and never altered. But perhaps its most disappointing quality is how relatively tame it all feels. You can easily see Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy in Johansson and Bell’s roles but you can’t see them going through something so undemanding and formulaic.
It’s hard to say if there’s much, or any, improvisation going on as the film is very driven by these small, disconnected feeling, set-pieces. Kravitz is forced to enter into a threeway with swinging neighbours Demi Moore and Ty Burrell which results in a fairly PG-13 sex scene, there’s some Seth Rogen weed and coke humour thrown around for a second here and there but it rarely results in some kind of payoff. Rough Night is very by-the-numbers, sketch-based, comedy and may have been too much too soon for the creators of it.
The core cast is terrific but they’re never doing anything more than just getting by and the film is strangely overconfident in itself (as demonstrated by the film’s post-credits sequence), which may be symptomatic of being included on the 2015 Blacklist (a lot of them are made into flops), and it spends a lot more time on a story filled with turns you can see a mile off than on its performances and characters - the things that tend to stick with an audience from a comedy.
Rough Night is out now in UK cinemas.
