Rough Night
/"The best nights never go as planned."
Filmology Rating: 2 out of 4
I’m not a member of the female gender nor do I have any plans to get married anytime soon; what I’m trying to say is that I’m not the audience for Rough Night. While I do enjoy Kate McKinnon and Scarlett Johansson in most movies I still couldn’t find myself getting excited for the female version of The Hangover films; I must add that is not me saying I’m a fan of those films because I actually find them to be some of the most overrated films ever filmed. I struggled to find reason to be excited for this film other than we hardly ever get any female-centric comedies and I should want to champion this film.
Jess, played by Scarlett Johansson, is getting married to her dream Peter, played by Paul W Downs. So the bachelorette party planned by Jess’ best friend Alice, played by Jillian Bell, is going to be a weekend to never forget in Miami. The two meet up with old college friends Blair, played by Zoe Kravitz, Frankie, played by Ilana Glazer, and Pippa, played by Kate McKinnon, where the partying at first starts out rather small but then goes crazy when they accidentally kill a male stripper.
One of the big pushes from the marketing team of this film is that Rough Night is one of the biggest R rated comedies directed by a woman in twenty years. Some aspects about that statement bother me; the first being that a great comedy must be rated R. Some of my favorite comedies aren’t rated R: The Lego Movie, Crazy, Stupid, Love, and Scott Pilgrim vs the World to name a few. A filmmaker could make one of the edgiest films like Sausage Party from last year and I could just find most of the humor offensive rather than funny. Try to make good content and don’t focus on the rating of the film, let the film speak for itself. The second aspect of the statement that bothers me is that women aren’t directing many comedies or films in general. Some filmgoers will claim that comedy films directed by women don’t fair well at the box office and don’t connect with a crowd; shame on those people because you can easily say the same thing about male directors. For every Hot Pursuit you will be able to find five Dirty Grandpas. Needless to say, we need to have more films directed by women, only they need to be given better material than what is shown here in Rough Night.
I’ve never watched the show Broad City, which is one of the few credits director Lucia Aniello has in her filmography, but I have heard great things about the show. This is Aniello’s feature film debut and she lands it poorly. The film is being marketed as a comedy but the film has surprisingly little laughs even when the film goes to some of its darker moments, once Alice kills the stripper and the group of friends look for ways to cover for their mistake. I have no issue with dark comedies; like Dr.Strangelove, Seven Psychopaths, and Thank You for Smoking; so having a comedy dealing with some of the darker sides of humanity doesn’t offend me in anyway. However, if you want to deal with the darker sides of humanity then do it, don’t make a film that deals with shallow sitcom like situations that an active viewer can figure out the outcome within seconds of the situation happening. Nothing in this film is surprising and very little is actually funny.
Rough Night had only one goal to accomplish for me to recommend the movie: make me laugh. It sadly gets a few chuckles but doesn’t get an actual laugh. With the understanding the comedy is subjective, if I’m the only person in the audience on the opening night of a film and I’m not finding your film entertaining then you have failed at making a movie that will stand the tests of time and will be completely forgotten in a week.
Rating: Skip It
-Jonny G