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Movie review: Date Night
By Maggie Scott
It’s sad when the one and only truly funny line in an American comedy is spoken in a foreign language and you have to get the punch line by reading it in the subtitles. Such is the case with the much-anticipated comedy, Date Night, starring two of the hottest comedians in the business: Steve Carell and Tina Fey.
Not only is the funniest line in Hebrew, but it’s one of the rest you can more or less count on the fingers of one hand. Carell and Fey are adorable performers with the material they’ve made their fame and fortune on: Carell in The Office and Fey as a mainstay of the Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock crews. They’ve both branched out into feature-length films (Get Smart; Baby Mama) without real success. And, though they’re giving their characters in this story the old college try, the result is rather embarrassing at best and painful at worst.
As average, busy burbanites with two kids, Claire and Phil Foster are discovering that their old get-up-and-go in the bedroom has got-up-and-went. He’s a tax consultant and she’s a real estate agent; or, in Claire’s words, “just a dull couple from New Jersey.”
Afraid they’re becoming “excellent roommates,” Phil decides a night in New York City is just the remedy—ignorant of the fact at their dinner destination that at the prices the popular seafood restaurant charges, the “crab better sing, dance and introduce us to the Little Mermaid.” Having forgotten a little detail like reservations, the Fosters are shuffled off to wait at the crowded bar, where Claire begins to think they are in a “place that isn’t us.”
She doesn’t know the half of it, when Phil gets the bright idea to pretend that he and Claire are two no-shows by the name of Tripplehorn, in order to grab their reservation. At first the deception is fun and the food is fine. Then, two sinister-acting men Phil and Claire think are the restaurant’s bouncers, order them outside….and, it’s as if Alice had gone through the looking glass.
Suddenly, the story turns into middling malarkey posing as a satirical thriller featuring a mobster (Ray Liotta), a corrupt District Attorney (William Fichtner), a bare-chested, muscle-bound security agent (Mark Wahlberg), two dim whit blackmailers (James Franco; Mila Kunis), a valuable flash drive and a private club where the “boring married couple” get to improvise. This is the only hysterically funny moment in the film—the buildup to a live sex show starring themselves.
Extracting themselves from their mistaken-identity dilemma will provide the couple with opportunities to demonstrate the daring, resourceful and deeply caring sides of their personalities regular married life had more or less suppressed.
Writer Josh Klausner’s prosaic mush strands Carell and Fey in a narrative wasteland that deprives them of the kind of comedy sketch material with which they are consummate geniuses. Director Shawn Levy should have deep-sixed the crudities and given Carell and Fey permission to ad lib to their hearts’ content their natural affinities for classic, clean-cut screwball inventiveness.
Although Date Night feels more like a blind date that didn’t work out, most people will more than likely hope that Carell and Fey make another date to co-star in something more worthy of their talent. A 20th Century Fox release, rated PG-13 for sexual and crude content, language, some violence and a drug reference.
