' Vacation Friends' Brings The Fun But Overstays Its Welcome
Starring John Cena, Lil Rel Howery, Meredith Hagner, Yvonne Orji
Rated R
Comedy
Run time: 1 hr, 43 min
Directed by Clay Tarver
On Hulu August 27, 2021
I’m starting to get concerned that John Cena doesn’t sleep, considering this is the second movie this month that I’m reviewing that he’s starred in. (Side note: imagining that somehow The Suicide Squad is the sequel to this movie makes the whole thing a bit more entertaining.) Vacation Friends is absolutely, exactly what it claims to be: a raunchy, ridiculous comedy of errors featuring some faces you know taking the brunt of the insanity. It has a lot of Hangover DNA, leaning heavily on situations that 95% percent of humans will literally never find themselves in and giving us characters that manage to crack jokes even in the tensest of moments. Through some carefully balanced personalities and just enough reality, Vacation Friends does mostly land, even if towards the end you’re just waiting for it all to get resolved and over with.
The movie follows Marcus (Howery) and Emily (Orji) as a couple heading on - you guessed it - vacation where Marcus hopes to propose. The odds do not seem to be in their favor, as we learn early on that Emily’s dad is far from being Marcus’ biggest fan and then every single detail about the proposal goes to crap when the residents of the suite above them flooded their jacuzzi and fully ruined their room and dream moment. Unsurprisingly, the couple staying in said suite are Ron (Cena) and Kyla (Hagner), who are exactly opposite in personality, lifestyle and priorities. They invite Marcus and Emily to share their truly palatial suite for the duration of the vacation in hopes of making amends for how it all started off. From there, hijinks ensue, covering everything including what may or may not be a legally binding marriage in a cave, drugs, drinking and boating mishaps and adventures. However, the newly engaged couple learns when they return home and to real life that what happens on vacation doesn’t always stay on vacation.
The main issue of this film is that it’s just one note. One couple prefers order, structure and familiarity while the other is the complete opposite and when the two combine, it can cause both hilarity and disaster. By either providing a few more grounded moments to make it seem just on the edge of reality or just cutting it down by about 15-20 minutes, this would have settled more into the solid comedy realm that so many of its predecessors were able to reach. Instead, things that would have amused me in the first half of the film grew exhausting by the end and made me want to say, “Okay, we get it,” out loud. While it is a relatively large problem to have with a movie, everything else was pretty enjoyable. It was great to see Orji in a role outside of Insecure, but it didn’t seem too dissimilar to that character, and totally could have been a spinoff. She’s the one I wanted to see more of in this, but she seems to mostly be the straight man foil to everyone else that she gets shoved to the back more often than not.
I do really enjoy that John Cena seems game to do just about anything with his roles nowadays. He’s proving time and time again that he really is a great asset to the comedy world thanks to his sheer size and physicality and deadpan delivery of some incredibly ridiculous lines. The more I see of him, the more I’m on board with his appearance in almost every 5th movie I seem to be watching. It’d be extremely easy for him to fall into the cookie cutter action movie hero guy, but comedy is really where he excels, and I think he knows that. He and Hagner have great chemistry and despite being burnt out on them by the end, I had to admit I was curious to see how their story played out, and with it being free to Hulu subscribers, it did seem worth the watch, even though I’m not sure I would have paid to see it in a theater.