Rough Night is one of the hardest kinds of movies to review: a decent mainstream comedy. Indy comedies are easier because there’s usually some other subtext that you can discuss without giving any of the jokes away. Bad mainstream comedies are easier because the jokes aren’t funny so you don’t feel bad about ruining them. But it’s difficult to go into detail about why it works without giving away some of the best jokes. Rough Night, the directorial debut of Broad City writer Lucia Aniello, works with the same blueprint as more recent raunchy mainstream comedies like The Hangover and Bridesmaids with some Weekend at Bernie’s peppered in for good measure, but isn’t operating on nearly the same level as any of them.
Our story follows a group of old college friends who have convened to Miami for the first time in ten years for a bachelorette party. Jess (Scarlett Johansson) is the bride-to-be and an upcoming politician, Alice (Jillian Bell) is her clingy best friend who organized the whole getaway, Frankie (Ilana Glazer) is a professional activist, Blair (Zoe Kravitz) is a rich independent businesswoman who had a fling with Frankie back in college, and Pippa (Kate McKinnon) is a tagalong friend of Jess’s from her semester abroad in Australia. The party goes south when they hire a male stripper at the last minute and one of the girls accidentally kills him. With no one wanting to call the police, they try to dispose of the body and get rid of the evidence themselves, making everything worse with the situation spiraling out of control in a series of misunderstandings that make them all look even more guilty than before.
The movie has a similar socially conscious screwball tone to Broad City, except it switches out the specificity of that series with more, no pun intended, broadness. While there are plenty of laughs to be had, I’d be lying if I said the jokes were original and unpredictable. If you’ve ever seen a comedy where someone has to deal with a dead body, the beats become pretty easy to guess, especially since body disposal is the whole crux of the main story. It does mix things up in a few ways, some that work, some that don’t. One of the best parts is a B-plot where Jess’s fiancée (Paul W. Downs, who also co-wrote the script) has a comparatively modest bachelor party that gets upended by doubts about the future of his marriage after a botched phone call from Jess. There’s also a twist about who the male stripper really is that takes a bit of a dark turn, but it does provide a chance for Johansson to use her experience in action movies to great effect. Some of the wrenches thrown into plot don’t always work though, particularly a part with a lecherous swinger couple next door (Ty Burrell and Demi Moore) who take a liking to Blair, which the girls use to their advantage in an attempt to get things done undetected, but gets pretty uncomfortable and may cross a line or two for some people.
What really holds the movie together is the cast and characters. Most directors would kill to have an ensemble with this kind of pedigree, and just about everyone pulls their weight. McKinnon is one of the standout performances, even though pretty much doing her regular human cartoon shtick that made her the best part of the Ghostbusters reboot. Jillian Bell’s character gets a lot of laughs as the excitable one who keeps clamoring for Jess’s attention, and Glazer brings a lot of depth to a character who probably would’ve been caricature if written by a man. The jokes they’re saddled with are a bit of a mixed bag, and the hitters are really only commendable for what they don’t do. For example, Frankie’s lesbian social activist character is given way more depth than she would have if she were written by a man, while most of the jokes at Alice’s expense are more about her being clingy and sexually repressed instead of her being the heavyset member of the group (although she is the one who kills the stripper by jumping on him). On the other hand, most of McKinnon’s jokes are wasted on her since they’re mostly a fill-in-the-blanks chart of Australian stereotypes, and Zoe Kravitz isn’t really given much to do until the swinger couple shows up. In fact, it’s Paul W. Downs who nearly walks away with the show since his plot goes in some pretty insane directions and collides with the finale like a clown car busting through the walls.
Beyond that, there’s not much else to say about Rough Night. It’s a fun little movie with a macabre twist, the cast is pretty solid, and while the jokes were kind of hit and miss, the ones that did hit hit hard. If you’re looking for something to see on a girl’s night out, you can do a lot worse.
7/10
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