I hadn’t planned on watching Vacation Friends off Hulu. I didn’t even know it was coming, truth be told. But this was the same service that dropped the hilarious Palm Springs last year, and I didn’t see that one much coming either. Fine, I might have gotten a bit more advanced warning on Palm Springs since I discovered Vacation Friends existed when I literally logged into Hulu that day, but still, the service did offer a potentially strong track record for this sort of thing.
Plus, John Cena has some surprisingly good comedic timing given where he originally came from. There’s some real potential on display if nothing else.
Marcus (Lil Rel Howery) is taking his girlfriend Emily (Yvonne Orji) to a fabulous resort vacation in Mexico with the intention of proposing. Marcus, a bit of a worrywort who perhaps believes in planning a little too much, is appaled to find their room flooded thanks to the poor behavior of their upstairs neighbors, and his surprise proposal is much less of s surprise when Emily finds out before he has a chance to ask. However, their story touches the hearts of fellow guests Ron (Cena) and Kyla (Meredith Hagner). The two of them have the biggest luxury room in the resort and more than enough room to share with the couple. The problem is Ron and Kyla are a very wild pair, given to drink, drugs, and general destruction under the philosophy that as long as no one gets hurt, who cares? Marcus and Emily have a much wilder time than they could have ever anticipated, but when the week is out, they just want to go home and plan their wedding, never thinking they would ever see Ron and Kyla again. Marcus has enough problems as, despite running his own construction company, Emily’s wealthy father Howard (Robert Wisdom) has never really approved of him, and the rest of her family seems to have fallen in line with that. Marcus really wants the wedding itself to go off perfectly, but then the unthinkable happens seven months after the crazy vacation: Ron and Kyla show up and crash the weekend-long event.
What follows is perhaps not the most unexpected of plots as Ron and Kyla seem to both cause nothing but problems for Marcus and Emily but also somehow manage to charm the other guests at the event, including and particularly Howard. Ron and Kyla are a pair who treat money like it’s no object, particularly since they don’t seem to have any, but always come out of every bad decision more or less untouched while Marcus suffers humiliation after humiliation. It’s a familiar plot. If anything, Vacation Friends gets credit in that, while Marcus is the one most likely to suffer from Ron and Kyla’s antics due in part to the way he is portrayed as their opposite, Emily is just as horrified to see the pair roll up as Marcus is. It makes for a nice change of pace where the uptight male is usually the only one who wants the crazy couple gone.
That said, there isn’t a whole lot here that fits my cup of tea. Jokes are either somehow predictable or drawn out for far too long. Most of what is on display seems to be relying on Cena and Howery’s respective charms to carry the movie. That can only work but so long, and the movie can’t quite rise above the material the actors are given. Both actors have a gift for comedic timing given the right material. Cena, for example, did really well as part of the ensemble in The Suicide Squad, and while Howery’s range may not be as impressive as other actors, he has a nice niche he can fit into most of the time. Here, the material just doesn’t support the two actors or anyone else in the movie either.
The movie ends the way these movies always do, and while it wasn’t awful or anything, I don’t know that I would recommend it to anyone aside from people who are really into this genre of mismatched buddy comedy where at least one of the buddies doesn’t realize how good a buddy the other one is right away until after he’s come out of his shell and the crazy buddy has inadvertently helped out more than anyone could have known. So, no, this was not the second coming of Palm Springs, but it was a passable enough diversion for a lazy Sunday.
Grade: C
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