Date Night
|  As a high-concept, big studio action-comedy, much of Date Night unsurprisingly feels like it was written by a computer program, and when it works, it is only because of the canny casting of its leads. Steve Carell and Tina Fey, who have separately carved out a unique position in the Hollywood universe that allows them to slide easily and successfully between work on television and the big screen, play Phil and Claire Foster, an all-too-typical New Jersey suburban married couple with two young children, two jobs, one nice house, and virtually no time or energy to invest in their relationship. On their monthly date night they decide to go into New York City and try to get into the trendiest of trendy new restaurants with no reservation. Of course, they’re not getting in until Phil makes the snap decision to grab the reservation of a couple who hasn’t shown up, which leads to them being mistakenly identified by a pair of gun-toting thugs (Jimmi Simpson and Common), which turns their date night into a 12-hour nightmare in which they are literally running for their lives across the five boroughs.Having already helmed Cheaper by the Dozen (2003), The Pink Panther (2006), and both Night at the Museum movies, director Shawn Levy has staked his career on choreographing comical mayhem, and the competent manner in which he handles Date Night can’t really be faulted because it works on its own terms, but is never anything more than the absolute minimum it has to be. Interestingly, Date Night is at its best in the first 20 minutes, before all hell breaks loose, when it is focusing on the unavoidable exhaustions and routines of married life. Carell and Fey are notoriously nice people, and even when they play characters who are egocentric or obsessive or annoying, you can’t help but like them. As Phil and Claire, they get to invest their cookie-cutter characters with a hint of deviance, which comes out in the funny games they play at restaurants filling in other diners’ conversations (it is great fun for them, but it also underscores their own lack of things to talk about). Levy allows us to see that they are good-natured people stuck in a rut of schedules and sexual rain checks, without overplaying it. In other words, they are plausible characters and we are allowed to see that they still love and care for each other and don’t want to go the way of their friends Brad and Haley (Mark Ruffalo and Kristen Wiig), who are divorcing in order to pursue a second adolescence. The catastrophe of Phil and Claire’s date night in the big city (they’re little fish in a pond that is much too big for them) turns out to be the spark that reminds them why they are still together, but one wishes that screenwriter Josh Klausner (Shrek Forever After) had come up with some more unique action sequences or plot devices. Too much of their hectic running around feels rote and uninspired, and when it works it is only because we feel the energy of Carell and Fey ad-libbing their way through the concept into something deeper and funnier. There are a few inspired running gags, particularly the absurd inclusion of Mark Wahlberg as a perpetually shirtless black-ops security expert who Claire once helped find some real estate. Wahlberg, who is often so dull in leading roles, pulls the amazing trick of threatening to steal the show from Carell and Fey with his smooth nonchalance, although he is really just another concept for them to bounce comedy off of, with Fey’s girlish fawning over his muscles enflaming Carell’s constant insecurity (has there even been a comedic actor who plays feeling sexually threatened so well?). James Marsden and Mila Kunis also have an amusing scene in which they play the terribly named couple whose missed reservation was the cause of all of the confusion, but it’s really too little too late, as Date Night has long since revealed its general lack of inspiration, something its actors can only hide for so long.
Copyright ©2010 James Kendrick Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick All images copyright © 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Overall Rating: 
(2.5)
