VEGAS  VACATION

Chevy Chase serenading The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” is a cue to the insipidness ahead for us in Vegas Vacation, the toothless, regurgitated swan song for Chase’s reign over the Vacation label. Stephen Kessler is an inept  hack director who resorts to a record scratch and zany music for guffaws. The one quasi-funny in-joke is Clark’s line that he “doesn’t even recognize [the kids] anymore” because the actors for Audrey and Rusty have been recast with each successive movie.

Like Jerry Lewis who should’ve outgrown his juvenile pratfalls, Chase is obviously anaesthetized as to when he should retire from a young man’s sports like being suspended bodily over the Hoover Dam. Chase is too listless to even lob jeers at Cousin Eddie. At this point, he is a doddering old man without copacetic comic timing.

Wayne Newton was a surprisingly Machiavellian villain in The Adventures of Ford Fairlane but this is a charmless send-up of his glitzy stage persona. Every rimshot is a joyless retread from Eddie’s disability capitalization to Clark yelling for Rusty (Ethan Embry) when he is plainly in sight to Cousin Catherine’s (Miriam Flynn) silent rage over “not having a minute free” and multiple pregnancies.

The Vacation movies don’t necessarily require obscenities for their levity but it’s a snapshot of the zeitgeist that they’ve shackled themselves from the R-rated original to this PG-rated appendage. Squeaky-voiced Wallace Shawn and loutish Randy Quaid can usually disentomb chuckles wherever they are but they are nuisances in this strident outing.

It’s such a tawdry, last-ditch effort to conjure the cockles of the heart when Lindsay Buckingham’s iconic song begins and Clark is revisited by the Girl in the Red Ferrari (Brinkley again). The payoff to the callback is that Brinkley is now a coquettish mom which is a pretty discouraging illustration of the passage of time and the necessity of sowing one’s oats.

After this debacle, Vacation would lie dormant like a Sleeping Giant before New Line bought the rights and began tinkering with the misbegotten notion of a remake. Thankfully cooler heads prevailed and a sequel-reboot is slated for release July 29th with Rusty as the newfangled patriarch. Let’s hope it continues the odd number trend of solid comedies.

Rating: 1 out of 5

NATIONAL LAMPOON’S CHRISTMAS VACATION

If the dreary European Vacation proved anything, it’s that the Griswolds are at optimal dysfunction when they are stateside which explains why Christmas Vacation is a mirthful, gregarious return-to-form for the franchise. While the ensemble of grandparents is an underwritten afterthought, Chase doesn’t buckle under the herniated pressure and this is only secondary to the first film for quality’s sake.

Of the paramount improvements is the reprise of Cousin Eddie and honestly, Randy Quaid plunders a majority of the yuk-yuks with his sweetly panhandling act. It’s difficult not to snicker when Eddie misconstrues Clark’s “heart bigger than his brain” insult as a compliment or when Eddie is disseminating his septic tank into the gutter because the “shitter was full”.

Chase exhibits a naturalistic chemistry with the ravishing D’Angelo but his security blanket are side-splitting scenes of quietly seething resentment with Quaid (“Anything I can do for ya?…Drive you out to the middle of nowhere, leave you for dead?”). John Hughes bores straight to the irritants of the season (ex. The Christmas lights assembly, gift-wrapping, the tree selection, etc.).

Personally, this might be the funniest performance by Chevy in the whole series. His innuendo-laden Freudian slips with a department store employee and his rooftop physical comedy are all pitched perfectly. His finest moment is Clark’s breathlessly verbose tirade against his cold-blooded boss (Brian Doyle Murray) after he supposedly receives his bonus check. Chase seizes the George Carlin-esque monologue and recites it in an outburst that is both senseless and achingly human.

Next door to the Griswolds is the zenithal target for Clark’s Murphy Law: two postmodern yuppies without a family to gather around the fireplace (the enjoyably stiff, Type-A foils Julia Louis Dreyfus and Nicholas Guest). The height of madcap lunacy is the squirrel chase and Jeremiah Chechik displays a knack for Mel Brooks delirium with Angelo Badalamenti’s score as an impish companion to the wildly overamped proceedings.

Today, this is deservedly lauded as a perennial holiday classic and it is repeated on television stations. For all intensive purposes, Christmas Vacation overshadows the 1983 paradigm in most viewers’ memories. If this had concluded in a trilogy, it would’ve been a hermetic franchise with terrific bookends. Purposelessly the Griswolds would sojourn to Las Vegas in their next disenchanting add-on.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5