'Rough Night' Is A Comedy Cocktail That Goes Down Easy [Review]

Mixing equal parts of “The Hangover,” “Very Bad Things,” and “Bridesmaids,” “Rough Night” is a comedy cocktail that goes down easy. It adheres a bit too closely to the recipe established by its predecessors, but it works well enough to keep the audience laughing. Written by director Lucia Aniello and co-star Paul W. Downs, the film is at its strongest when its humor dives into the deep end of the female experience – or any time Kate McKinnon is on screen.

Sporting a haircut that would make Hillary proud (sob), Jess (Scarlett Johansson) is running for state senator, while planning her wedding to Peter (Downs). Her freshman-year roommate Alice (Jillian Bell) plans a bachelorette weekend in Miami, reuniting them with college friends Frankie (Ilana Glazer) and Blair (Zoë Kravitz), while adding Jess’s Australian friend Pippa (McKinnon) to the mix. Against the would-be politician’s better judgment, a night of heavy drinking escalates with the addition of cocaine and the appearance of a stripper (Ryan Cooper). Alice accidentally kills (manslaughters?) the stripper, leading the fivesome to desperately try to cover up his death to save Jess’s political career.

 

blankNo one watches movies like “Rough Night” for the plot, but the story here grows more ludicrous with each passing moment and each line of coke done by the five women. They dig themselves deeper with each bad decision, but that’s typical of these types of flicks. Where “Rough Night” sins the most is in its third act, which *minor spoiler* absolves Alice of the stripper’s death in far too convenient a fashion, even for a movie this enjoyably silly. It also resolves the climatic scene in a way that undercuts the spirit of the movie.

The script does deserve praise for the specificity of each of its five central characters and its humor. Jokes don’t feel like they were doled out to each of the women in haphazard fashion. The humor relies on our knowledge of Jess, Alice, Pippa, Blair, and Frankie and their connections to each other. Moreover, Aniello and Downs didn’t just take the approach of simply writing filthy lines that would work for either gender: “Rough Night” has a recurring tampon gag that functions not only as funny dialogue, but also comments on the larger response by men to women’s periods. Oh, and it features the first IUD joke I’ve heard in a studio film. I nearly cheered.

 

blankBut the humor in “Rough Night” isn’t all feminist references to self-waxing and Daniel Holtzclaw (for real). It’s also funny regardless of your state of vagina possession, and a lot of that is due to McKinnon. As she did in “Ghostbusters,” she doesn’t hold back. The result is a performance that couldn’t have been delivered by any other actress. As Pippa, she is a masterful physical comedian who plays her sweet Australian character’s fish-out-of-water status to big laughs. Along with Bell and Glazer (who previously worked with Aniello and Down on “Broad City“), she gets most of the audience’s laughter, with Johansson and Kravitz playing it a little straighter.

With these performances and the chemistry between the ensemble, “Rough Night” explores the evolution of female friendship from college through adulthood in a way that feels real, even as it’s threaded through an over-the-top plot line. While its predecessor “Very Bad Things” reveled in its nastiness, in “Rough Night,” there’s real heart beneath the raunch.

 

Rough Night 2017The weakest element of “Rough Night” is the subplot involving the fiancé, Peter, who takes his own trip to Miami after his far-more-chill bachelor party with the bros (Eric André, Bo Burnham, Hasan Minhaj and Patrick Carlyle). Every time the movie cut to Peter’s adventures, I inwardly groaned. Downs isn’t as funny as most of his female counterparts, and the absurdism of his scenes didn’t mesh well with the rest of the movie. I’d love to see his lesser stake in the movie as a meta-commentary on the roles that women are usually relegated to as girlfriends and wives in similar male-driven movies, but it’s unlikely given the full investment in every joke.

Though it boasts a female director and co-writer, as well as a cast led by women, “Rough Night” likely won’t revolutionize the R-rated comedy genre all by itself, and it’s not meant to. It’s simply a crack in the glass ceiling of testosterone-driven raunch-fests, but what it’s most successful at is giving the audience a far better time than its protagonists are having. [B]