Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		2.5

Vacation Blu-ray Movie Review

"We're the Griswolds!" (Sorry, You're Not)

Reviewed by Michael Reuben November 2, 2015

At some point, almost all parents find themselves repeating behaviors they recognize from their own moms and dads. Still, you would think that Rusty Griswold, the son of Clark and Ellen, would have learned his lesson from his disastrous experiences as a kid in four feature films, beginning with National Lampoon's Vacation in 1983, and one video short, Hotel Hell Vacation in 2010. Rusty's determination to repeat the first of those catastrophic adventures by dragging his wife and two sons to the same Walley World theme park he visited in the first film is supposed to evidence the streak of madness that is Rusty's genetic inheritance from his dad. Just as Clark Griswold kept deluding himself into believing that a family vacation would bring everyone closer, now Rusty desperately wants to embrace the same fantasy. All evidence to the contrary will be ignored.

Unfortunately, neither the script nor its execution nor, despite his best efforts, the performance by Ed Helms as Rusty achieves the necessary effect. As co-writers and co-directors Jonathan M. Goldstein and John Francis Daley (Horrible Bosses) keep throwing in one desperate gag after another, they only make you realize how much you miss original writer John Hughes's ability to infuse cruel jokes with an affectionate touch and the loopy chemistry between Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo as the original Griswolds. Chase and D'Angelo make brief appearances in the new Vacation, but it's too little and too late to salvage it.

As if to innoculate their screenplay against charges of being derivative, Goldstein and Daley stage an awkward conversation between Rusty Griswold (Helms) and his family in which elder son James (Skyler Gisondo) declares: "I've never even heard of the original vacation!" To this Rusty replies: "Doesn't matter. The new vacation will stand on its own." It's hard enough to bring any film to life as an organic whole, but when you're making a combination sequel / reboot / remake, boldly staking such a self-referential claim is artistic suicide. You're virtually inviting the opposite result, because now the audience will constantly be comparing the new film to its predecessor.

In fact, Vacation can't possibly stand on its own, because so much of the plot exists for the sole purpose of echoing the 1983 original. Thus, even though Rusty works as a pilot for a bargain airline and could easily get the whole family cheap flights from their Chicago home to Walley World in Southern California, he decides they should drive there, because that's what happened in the first film. He acquires a ridiculous vehicle for the trip, because that's all that was available on short notice, which is (more or less) what happened to his father. Named the "Tartan Prancer", the minivan is described as "the Honda of Albania", and its numerous quirks, including an electrical plug for hybrid operation that resembles a corkscrew, supply a steady stream of sight gags. As in the first film, the family gets "tagged" by vandals, robbed of all their money, stranded in the desert, and abused by a local at the Grand Canyon. They keep encountering the same pretty girl along their route, but this time she's a teenager named Adena (Catherine Missal), and it's James, the elder son, she has eyes for. The younger son, Kevin (Steele Stebbins), is both too young and too obnoxious to attract female attention, and Rusty's flirtation with this film's "Ferrari Girl" (Hannah Davis, in the role originated by Christie Brinkley) is mercifully brief.

The problem is that none of these incidents feel as if they arise from the characters or their dysfunctional family dynamic. They occur because Vacation needs them as obligatory nods to its franchise. Goldstein and Daley then try to dress them up with post-American Pie gross-out humor, whether verbal (like Rusty mis-defining "rimjob" for James, so that he uses it inappropriately throughout the film) or literal (like the scene featured in the film's trailer, where the entire family wades into what they think are hot springs, only to discover that it's raw sewage).

The best parts of Vacation—"best" being a relative term here—are those that are least derivative. Christina Applegate brings something original to her portrayal of Debbie Griswold, Rusty's deceptively straight-arrow wife, who conclusively demonstrates that men do not always marry women like their mothers. As Rusty and the boys discover on a side trip to Debbie's alma mater in Memphis, their wife and mom remains a sorority legend for her youthful promiscuity and hard partying. The sequence in which Debbie tries to relive her glory days by doing the Chug Run, which involves pitchers of beer, an elaborate obstacle course and copious vomiting, handily exploits Applegate's gift for physical comedy. It's the kind of thing Clark Griswold might have done as a young man.

Equally novel is the family's visit to the Texas home of Rusty's sister, Audrey, now grown up and played by Leslie Mann. Although the visit is also a callback to the Griswolds' stay with Cousin Eddie in the first film, Audrey's situation is entirely different. She lives in a palatial home, courtesy of her highly paid but thoroughly sexist husband, a local weatherman named Stone Crandall (Chris Hemsworth). Most of the visit consists of Stone flaunting his wealth, good looks and sexual prowess, while Rusty struggles to compete (and fails miserably).

Vacation has a few other gags that are mildly amusing, but they are intermittent oases in a vast desert. Ultimately the film consists of mostly mediocre sketches strung together with an ill-conceived premise. The best sequence is the montage of embarrassing photos from assorted vacationers that accompanies the opening credits. Unlike the movie, those pictures feel real.

Vacation Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Vacation was shot digitally by Barry Peterson (We're the Millers, Zoolander); according to IMDb, the camera was the Arri Alexa Plus. Post-production was competed on a digital intermediate, from which Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray was presumably sourced by a direct digital path. The Blu-ray image shows all the usual virtues of digital capture: clean, sharp and detailed, with the added benefit of the film-like texture for which the Alexa is well-known. The color palette is generally realistic, although it appears to have been tweaked somewhat in post-production to facilitate the illusion that the cast is traveling to numerous locations, when in fact they never left Georgia, even for the scenes set at the Grand Canyon. No artifacts or interference of any kind were visible. Warner has mastered the film with an average bitrate of 29.39 Mpbs, which is generous for digitally acquired material.

Vacation Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Vacation's 5.1 soundtrack, encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA, is a typical comedy mix, in that the dialogue is clear and the key sound effects are distinctive and often cartoonishly exaggerated. The engine of a truck with which the Griswold family has a running dispute (shades of Duel) roars threateningly. The rapids of the Grand Canyon river on which they go white water rafting are boisterous and intimidating. The "Chug Run" obstacles that Debbie tries (and mostly fails) to avoid sound like mechanisms supplied to Wile E. Coyote by the Acme Corporation. Professional sound engineers know how to mix and position these kinds of effects for appropriate impact, without calling attention to individual speakers in the five-channel array, and Vacation's mix is thoroughly professional. The instrumental score was supplied by Mark Mothersbaugh (The LEGO Movie), but the most memorable music on the soundtrack consists of pop singles, including various versions of Lindsay Buckingham's signature Vacation anthem, "Holiday Road"; several variations on the Seals & Crofts ballad, "Summer Breeze"; and the Seal song, "Kiss from a Rose", for which Rusty will drop everything when it comes on the radio.

Vacation Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Return to Walley World (1080p; 1.78:1; 9:54): The cast, writer/directors and producers discuss the challenges of continuing the franchise.



• The Griswold Odyssey (1080p; 1.78:1; 18:23): A look at the making of the film, stop by stop, including the design of the Tartan Prancer minivan.



• Gag Reel (1080p; 2.40:1; 1:32): Far too short, it's funnier than much of the film.



• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 2.40:1; 12:13): The scenes are not listed, and cannot be selected, individually. The best material involves Audrey Griswold and her husband, Stone Crandall. The latter's debut on The Weather Channel would have been worth keeping.



• Georgia (1080p; 1.78:1; 2:02): A tribute to the State of Georgia, which doubled for all the other states where Vacation is set.

Vacation Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Vacation was largely panned by critics, and it wasn't a runaway hit, but it did well enough at the box office that I wouldn't bet against another entry in the franchise. If so, let's hope that a different creative team is hired, one that is confident enough to dispense with reliance on plot points lifted from prior films and invent something new. I am sure that Vacation has its fans, and for them this Blu-ray presentation will not disappoint. For everyone else, spend your money elsewhere.