“You just want to redo your vacation from 30 years ago?” Christina Applegate’s character asks in this dire sequel to “National Lampoon’s Vacation.” “Isn’t that just going to be a disappointment?”
That is perhaps the summer’s biggest understatement — and not just for Applegate, who ends up covered with human excrement for her trouble. That sound you hear is John Hughes and Harold Ramis, the writer and director of the original, rolling over in their graves. And not from laughter, which is in very short supply here.
This one is called “Vacation,” presumably because the National Lampoon — which has licensed its name to a long line of terrible comedies (“Animal House” is the only other exception) — wanted to distance itself from something this toxic.
Ed Helms plays Chevy Chase’s now-grown son, Rusty (married to Applegate), in this latest needless extension of a series that included three previous sequels through 1997 and a direct-to-video 2003 spinoff starring Randy Quaid, who perhaps not coincidentally has since exiled himself from the United States.
Making their debuts as writer-directors, Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (they wrote “Horrible Bosses”) manage to pull off only a frighteningly tiny percentage of their gags, partly because of poor timing and inept staging — and partly because they seem to have put less thought into the script than the booby-trapped Albanian SUV that carries the Griswolds on their journey.
Applegate bears the brunt of the humiliation, her character slut-shamed and given a pair of drunk scenes. Among the many guest stars is Chris Hemsworth, who demonstrates no gift for comedy whatsoever as a prodigiously endowed weatherman who is married to Rusty’s horny sister (Leslie Mann).
“Vacation” tries again and again to up the ante from its classic predecessor before calling in Chase and Beverly D’Angelo and even the original Truckster station wagon for brief appearances. But for all the F-bombs and references to “rim jobs” and “glory holes,” the geniuses behind the new film just don’t understand the difference between genuine subversiveness and pointless vulgarity.