Movie Review: Rough Night

Rough Night * / *****

Directed by: Lucia Aniello.

Written by: Lucia Aniello & Paul W. Downs.

Starring: Scarlett Johansson (Jess), Jillian Bell (Alice), Zoë Kravitz (Blair), Ilana Glazer (Frankie), Kate McKinnon (Kiwi / Pippa), Paul W. Downs (Peter), Ryan Cooper (Jay), Ty Burrell (Pietro), Demi Moore (Lea), Enrique Murciano (Detective Ruiz), Dean Winters (Detective Frazier), Colton Haynes (Real Scotty), Patrick Carlyle (Patrick), Eric André (Jake), Bo Burnham (Tobey), Hasan Minhaj (Joe).

 

Is there anything more depressing than a terrible movie made for and by an unrepresented group in Hollywood? Rough Night is a raunchy, R-rated comedy co-written and directed by a woman – Lucia Aniello – and starring five incredibly talented actresses – Scarlett Johansson, Jillian Bell, Zoe Kravitz, Ilana Glazer and Kate McKinnon – and yet it is pretty much a comedic dead zone. After the success of Bridesmaids, you would have thought we would have gotten more films attempting to do what that film did – but it seems like the only thing Hollywood learned from it was that Melissa McCarthy is a movie star (of that, we can at least be thankful). Rough Night should have been the long delayed payoff of movies like Bridesmaids – instead, it’s so bad, and did so poorly at the box office, I fear that Hollywood will go back to thinking that movies like this will never work.

 

The film is about the bachelorette weekend for Jess (Johansson) thrown for her by her best friend Alice (Bell) – who wants to relive their university glory days of drinking to excess. Along for the weekend are two other university friends – Frankie and Blair (Glazer and Kravitz) who apparently were lovers in school, but split up since – with Blair becoming rich, and married to a man. Then there is Pippa (Kate McKinnon) – a crazed eccentric with a horrible Australian accent along for the ride. Their weekend is Miami starts with drinking, then moves to cocaine and eventually they hire a stripper from Craigslist who show up – and is, uh, killed in a freak accident. Fearing they’re lives will be ruined by this, they try to hide the body – and hilarity is supposed to ensue.

 

Dark comedy like this is hard to pull off – it’s not easy to mix death and humor together – but Aniello pretty much makes the whole thing impossible by insisting on making her characters likable. The movie has the same basic plot as Peter Berg’s Very Bad Things (1998) – which wasn’t a very good movie, but at least had the sense to make the group of men who accidentally kill a prostitute at a bachelor party into horrible people. The revelations about the true identity of the stripper that comes late in Rough Night don’t much help – it’s meant to make everything okay, but it’s labored and forced instead. The film essentially wants to make its leads likable, funny killers – and it just doesn’t much work.

 

The cast seems game for pretty much anything – and throw themselves at every opportunity for humor imaginable. Bell and McKinnon seem to be trying to top each other in terms of who can go more crazily over-the-top – which you would think would be funny – since both are usually so good at doing just that. They don’t have much to work with though. Glazer and Kravitz fare worse because neither even tries to go for broke, and the material about their supposed love-hate relationship never quite comes together – you don’t get the simmering sexual tension between them you should. In theory, Johansson should be the “straight” woman in the bunch – the calm, rational center of the film that the film needs to ground it from all the craziness around her. But since the craziness never really takes off, her performance comes across more as boring than anything else.

 

In a perfect world, Rough Night would be seen as what it is – a singular misfire by talented people, who simply whiffed on one. While I have watched Broad City – I trust those who say Aniello’s work on that show, as both writer and director – is good – and I know the rest of the cast is great. Instead, I fear that this horrible movie will set back female led comedies in Hollywood. That’s silly and stupid I know – men seem to be able to fail again and again and again and have no penalty – but I also fear it’s true.