‘Game Night’ review: Joyful mystery

John Francis Daley and Joathan M. Goldstein’s Game Night isn’t exactly revolutionary comedy, but that doesn’t take anything away from the fact that it’s an insanely fun ride.

Patterns and sensibilities

The film has the same patterns and sensibilities as films like The Hangover and its sequels, where ordinary people who in the spirit of scaling up the fun are plunged into a world of crime and violence. This time, instead of pals out to spend the night in a drunken stupor, domesticated suburban middle class folks who prefer Scrabble to scotch will end up finding themselves in the middle of an abduction.

Max (Jason Bateman) and Annie (Rachel McAdams) met in one of the game nights they frequented.

Connected by their insatiable competitive spirit, they fall in love and eventually marry. Several years later, Annie discovers that Max can’t produce healthy sperm because of the stress he gets whenever he is compared to his more handsome, more successful brother Brooks (Kyle Chandler). To help Max finally get over his brother’s supposed superiority, Annie decides to help Max defeat Brooks in one game, a crime-solving mystery that would have all the participants scrambling for clues for a chance to win a sports car.

That game however turns out to be more than what they expected.

The jokes are grounded on the absurdity of regular people who aren’t armed with any useful skills doing quite well in situations where they are pitted against thugs and evil masterminds. Game Night is peppered with scenes of a suburban couple teaching a gang of gun-toting baddies yoga poses, or a wife attempting to stitch her husband’s gun wound with implements available at a standard convenience store.

Hardly any lulls

All of the film’s hilariously ridiculous scenes are assembled together with hardly any lulls.

It just keeps on working for its chuckles, mining the conceit for everything its worth. It is deliciously irreverent as well. It pokes fun at everything, from Denzel to Donald, all in the aim of having dialogues that will match the film’s terse pacing. Mark Perez’s screenplay is notable, with its twists and surprises making narrative sense despite being hinged on so much nonsense.

It actually works as a real mystery whose precise unraveling produces as much wonder as laughs.

Bateman and McAdams are terrific as the married couple who accidentally become heroes. Game Night however wouldn’t have worked as well without the other cast members. Jesse Plemons, who plays the couple’s next door neighbor who gets left out of all the game nights, is an amusing presence. The rapport of everybody else with each other becomes the meat of the film, turning each precious line into an uproarious event.

Not game-changing

Game Night will not end up changing the game for comedies, but as it is, it isn’t a bad way to spend a couple of hours, as it is bound to have you rolling in guiltless laughter, all at the expense of such outrageous ordinariness. – Rappler.com

Francis Joseph Cruz litigates for a living and writes about cinema for fun. The first Filipino movie he saw in the theaters was Carlo J. Caparas’ Tirad Pass. Since then, he’s been on a mission to find better memories with Philippine cinema.