Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I was surprised to get an invitation to the press screening of a Fox movie. For some reason Tom Rothman doesn’t like us much over here… I’m sure it has nothing to do with the multiple anti-Rothman editorials pleading to the Fox shareholders to give him the boot and save the studio from mediocrity, right?
But I like watching movies, especially movies with promise and from the TV spots I thought there was a shot that Steve Carell and Tina Fey’s chemistry was gonna work. Sure, the premise is slight (a married couple go out on a date, get mistaken for blackmailers and run for their lives), but so are the plots to many similar comedies… The Out-of-Towners comes to mind (the original Arthur Hiller movie with Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis, not the remake with Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn).
I tweeted this while walking to my car after the credits rolled on Date Night:
Date Night is a miracle. Unfortunately the miracle is Fox invited me to a press screening. The movie itself is bland and lifeless.
The responses I got where of the “what the hell did you expect from a Shawn Levy movie?” variety. But I’m the one guy that rolled with NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM… The first one. And not that I even think it’s a great, misunderstood film, but I loved seeing Dick Van Dyke and Mickey Rooney onscreen again and to the degree that they are in the flick.
Maybe if I was going into the movie thinking “Shawn Levy, Shawn Levy, Shawn Levy” I would have liked it more, but I went in as someone who watches The Office and 30 Rock every week and seeing those two leads collide was interesting to me.
Which is probably why the movie is going to do a lot of box office… plus it’s passable as a big studio comedy, so audience members not demanding anything more than a nice, air-conditioned theater and faces on the screen they recognize for their $10 might leave in a little bit better mood than I did… But I guarantee for the vast majority of them the film will be out their mind by the time they get back home and it will probably stay that way until they stumble across the movie on cable one late, boring night.
Call me crazy, but this could have been a good movie. Both Tina Fey and Steve Carell are at their peaks right now and they should have amazing chemistry. There are glimpses in the film where you can see that chemistry overcoming some shoddy, slapped together direction and awkward pacing, but those moments aren’t enough to save the film. Not even close.
Surprisingly the best scene in the movie is a serious one. Most of the comedy felt forced, like they just printed on a rehearsal and ignored the actual take, but there’s one moment that came across as genuinely sweet to me.
Carell and Fey are a couple that have grown comfortable… too comfortable. The spark has left the marriage. They might love each other, but they’re not in love with each other. They have friends who just broke off their marriage (played in a one-scene cameo by Mark Ruffalo and Kristen Wiig) because they just became “awesome roommates.”
This thought hangs over their forced date night and even while being chased by corrupt cops and searching for ways to clear their name their relationship is still obviously on their minds.
At one point they have a conversation where all comedy is dropped and it’s an honest “that’s not us, is it?” conversation. They both seem to be more scared that they might be drifting apart than they are of the men chasing them.
For one moment Fey and Carell were real people; scared and vulnerable, but still comfortable with each other, the sense of humor that brought them together as a couple comforting them. If those two had been the ones in the rest of the movie I’d be writing a different review.
I don’t know who’s to blame, but scenes just don’t cut together. The whole thing feels shallow, lacking any kind of layering that even straight up comedies like SuperBad have. There are jokes within jokes, call-backs and real emotion all intertwined in those films which aren’t present here.
And like I said above, the filmmaking is just shoddy. There’s going to be a high continuity error list on this one, I can tell. Know how I can tell? I usually don’t pick up on that stuff up on first viewing and here the problems were so glaring that they jumped right out at me. There’s a conversation early on between Fey and Carell where Fey changes position and eye-line every single time it cuts from a two-shot to an over-the-shoulder.
Maybe that shit’s in every movie, but if that’s true then the reason I noticed it so much in this one is because I wasn’t interested in what the characters were doing, I wasn’t invested and I latched on to the crazy continuity errors instead of the story.
I guess the reason I was so disappointed with this movie was because it should have been better. It’s not a horrendous movie or an insulting movie, it’s just a shallow, bleh movie that always has one foot on either side of mediocrity. With the talent in front of the camera it should have been better.
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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