Respond to these rapid questions in our Vacation quiz and we will tell you which Vacation character you are. Play it now.
The previous week, as I was leaving a screening of “Vacation,” a fellow critic, who was in the middle of an animated debate with some other coworkers, pointed at me and said, “You! I was able to hear YOU laughing. And I responded by saying, “Well, yes, I was laughing,” referring to certain aspects of the story.
My poor friend was looking for someone who agreed with him that the movie “c’mon, it wasn’t THAT bad.” At this point, he may have been searching desperatly for such an individual. In addition to that, my laugh is one of those that is hard to ignore, whether for better or for worse. However, I couldn’t agree with him that this necessarily self-conscious sequel — or is it a reboot? — to the famous “National Lampoon” films with the same title and central theme was funny. No way, no how. Because “Vacation” is, minute by minute, one of the most repugnant, mean-spirited gross-out comedies I’ve ever had the squirmy displeasure to sit through to the very end of its runtime. This never-ending charade of humiliation asks us to laugh at a gruesome death on the highway, another death that is presumed to have been caused by blunt-force trauma and/or drowning and/or (spoiler alert for those who sit through the end credits?) a bear attack. It finds humor in the scene of a young boy using an old hypodermic needle as a dart launched against his brother, and it finds humor in the scene of that brother unearthing his apparent virility by beating on a snooty teenage girl at the very end.
I could go on and on and on about this topic. But if you’ve seen the trailers, which feature the highway death gag, the hypo gag, and the set up to the hypo gag (which is that the clueless Griswold family, thinking they’ve discovered a secret, mineral-rich “hot spring,” are revealed to be swimming in a pool of raw sewage and more), you get the tone of the film, which is similar to that of the very popular, and largely vile and hypocritical “Hangover” movies. The highway death Ed Helms, who is known for his affable goofiness, plays the lead role in “Vacation,” which is similar to those films.
But you shouldn’t waste any more time and start this Vacation quiz.
Rusty Griswold, the teen son character initially played by Anthony Michael Hall in the 1983 film “National Lampoon’s Vacation;” the most famous subsequent Rusty is, I’d say, Johnny Galecki, who played the role in 1989’s “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” Here, Helms plays Rusty Griswold as an adult. In the first scene, Rusty, a pilot for an airline called “Econo-Air,” is given his hapless nice-guy props by an elderly coworker who is obviously suffering from dementia. This coworker nearly crashes the plane when Rusty leaves the cockpit for a bathroom break. Rusty is a nice guy, but he’s a hapless nice guy. You remember what I was saying about the jokes in this movie when I was talking to you earlier. After being forced to eat dirt on a shuttle line by a slick playboy pilot for a more elite carrier named Ron Livingston, Rusty returns home to find discontent in the domestic hearth. We are led to believe by Kevin’s (Steele Stebbins) beleaguered mother Debbie that James (Skylar Grisondo), his older brother, has been the victim of his younger son Kevin’s (Steele Stebbins) usual routine of taunting (Christina Applegate). This time, it’s by writing “James Has A Vagina” with a magic marker on the neck of his guitar. You remember what I was saying earlier, don’t you…
Vacation Quiz
Anyway. I might as well admit right now that Steele Stebbins, in his role as Kevin’s older brother who teases him, was the source of the majority of the movie’s humorous moments for me. It’s pretty clear that directors and co-writers Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (who also wrote “Horrible Bosses,” so, um, yeah) weren’t expecting to get more out of the character than the typical cheap “hey, check out this little kid cursing a blue streak” laughs. The character is typically nasty and foul-mouthed as written, and it’s pretty clear that they didn’t expect to get more out of the character than that. But Stebbins invests the character with a relentless bad-seed malevolence, a gleeful aura of irredeemability, which is so humiliating it’s actually quite funny most of the time. Perhaps I should be more disturbed than amused by this. Stebbins makes the character seem like an unredeemable bad seed.
Also, you will find out which character are you in this Vacation quiz.
As for the rest of the cast, well, I used to think that Ed Helms, whose upending of Middle American blandness on “The Daily Show” was always reliably funny, did those terrible “Hangover” films because they paid well; now I wonder that he actually believes these movies are good, and the question unsettles me. But such is the way of life. Christina Applegate, whose work on “Married With Children” gave her valuable experience in playing characters whose dignity, whatever it might be, is regularly affronted, demonstrates similar game good spirits in her activities here. “Married With Children” gave her valuable experience in playing characters whose dignity, whatever it might be, is regularly affronted. Again, you probably already know this from the trailer, but Chris Hemsworth, who plays Rusty’s brother-in-law, puts on an exaggerated Southern accent and walks around with an oversized prosthetic penis. “Vacation” presents an unusual point of view on the defining characteristics of the American psyche all the while the Griswold family is careening across the United States in their “imaginary car from hell” (a device that was used in the 1983 version of the film). This Made-in-the-USA family endures humiliation after humiliation, even to the point of literally swimming in feces at one point, but they continue to press forward in the pursuit of a prized objective, which is a trip to Walley World. And even then, debasement is just around the corner. And these dumb, wan, mediocre, sad-sack Americans are too stupid to even understand what is happening to them, but at the same time, they are too courageous to back down. Perpetual stooges.
For more personality quizzes check this: The Wedding Ringer Quiz.
