The original Vacation worked—and continues to work—because it mined a vein of humor in which Norman Rockwell Middle American idealism crashed headlong into the realities of shady car salesmen, obnoxious relatives, cheap tourist traps, and unbreachable generation gaps. It was a raunchy comedy for its time, but it was built on a foundation of nostalgia for the sanctity of the American family unit and the ever-dwindling role of the father as role model and guardian of the brood, which is what made Chevy Chase, with his square bromides and barely repressed mania, such an inspired casting choice. John Hughes based his script on “Vacation ’58,” a humorous story he wrote for The National Lampoon that was inspired by memories of his own childhood family vacations, and while it certainly dabbled in the tasteless—it does, after all, feature a scene in which the family ties a dead aunt’s body to the roof of the car and accidentally drags a dog to death—even its crudest jokes pale in comparison to the obnoxious grotesquerie masquerading as humor here.

Ed Helms picks up the misguided paterfamilias mantle as Rusty Griswold, a low-budget airline pilot whose family life has become a bit too staid. His wife Debbie (Christina Applegate) wants them to break free of their yearly trek to a cabin by the lake; but, instead of heeding her desire to go to Paris, Rusty instead plans a 2,000-mile drive from Chicago to California to take the family to Walley World. It’s pure nostalgia for him and misery for everyone else (all of whom claim, in a failed meta-moment, to not know anything about “the original vacation”). “Misery” is the only word to describe Rusty’s sons: sensitive, guitar-strumming, diary-writing teenager James (Skyler Gisondo) and hellaciously grinning preteen Kevin (Steele Stebbins), who are constantly at each other’s throats. Well, that’s not really true. Rather, Kevin relentlessly bullies James, an age-related reversal of brotherly behavior that generates not a single laugh, especially since Kevin is presented as such a brutal jerk and James as such a simpering wimp. It’s a far cry from the Rusty and Audrey of the original, who felt like, you know, real kids, rather than a screenwriter’s idea of plugging holes in a formula.

As in the original, the cross-country trek is besieged by all manner of unexpected indignities and unplanned delays. Rather than cruising in the metallic pea Wagon Queen Family Truckster, the Griswolds hit the road in a Tartan Prancer, a mini-SUV made by “the Honda of Albania,” whose various functions inevitably malfunction at all the wrong times (the car is, admittedly, one of the few bright spots in the film). Along the way the Griswolds bathe in raw sewage at what they think is a secret hot spring, are pursued by an 18-wheeler with a teddy bear menacingly strapped to the grill, and nearly die in a white-water rafting excursion led by a just-dumped suicidal guide (Charlie Day). There’s no Cousin Eddie to visit, but instead sister Audrey (Leslie Mann) and her wealthy stud of a husband, Stone Crandall (Chris Hemsworth), a Texas-drawling, rightwing weatherman who rounds up cattle first thing in the morning and inexplicably compares everything to faucets. Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo also show up belatedly as Clark and Ellen, although they have very little to do outside of making us wish we were watching any one of the better films they headlined (even 1997’s Vegas Vacation, the first of the series not penned by Hughes and lacking the National Lampoon headline, was a masterpiece by comparison).

Everything about this new Vacation feels strained and anxious, and when the jokes do hit, they are sporadic and bookended by long stretches of failed, often mean-spirited humor. Jokes have to be at least mildly believable to work, and no one is going to believe that someone would mistake a handful of public hair for a Brilo pad, no matter how large it might be. Many of the film’s supposed punchlines are telegraphed with glaring obviousness (when Rusty joins Stone in rounding up cattle on four-wheelers, there’s no surprise when he hits one), and Daley and Goldstein always push the already strained jokes right into the realm of the disgusting (if your idea of Ed Helms covered in cow guts is a real knee-slapper, this is your film).

Helms does the best he can with the material he’s given, but he generally looks as desperate as the film feels. He has the nerdiness down pat, but there’s no real edge to his insistence on bringing the family together against their wishes. Christina Applegate, who has proved herself to be a gifted comedienne numerous times over, is generally relegated to a thankless straight woman role except for the sequence in which she attempts to recreate her college glory days at her old sorority house and ends up humiliated and covered in vomit. If you see a pattern here, it’s because Vacation is generally unable to come up with laughs that don’t involve its characters being doused in vomit, feces, or viscera, a sad sign of how far short it falls of recreating even a hint of what made the original series so popular.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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