Plenty of adventure but few real laughs
Cinema
Daniel Carey
THE Coen brothers’ classic ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ is set during an election campaign in 1930s Mississippi. The governor, Pappy O’Daniel, is fighting a losing battle to remain in his post. His opponent, Homer Stokes, has signed up a midget to prove he’s a ‘servant of the little man’, and carries a broom with which he vows to ‘sweep this state clean’.
District Attorney Frank Crenshaw (William Fichtner) pops up in ‘Date Night’ with a broom of his own, but like Stokes in ‘O Brother’, he ultimately comes to a sticky end. The new movie from Shawn Levy, ‘Date Night’ tells the story of Phil Foster (Steve Carell) and his wife Claire (Tina Fey), a New Jersey couple struggling to find time for each other amid the pressure of work and raising a family.
Their only time alone is a once-weekly ‘date’, but that has itself gone stale. Claire is advised by a friend who’s divorcing her husband to ‘walk among the birds’ rather than opt for another night of potato skins and salmon at the local eatery. So the Fosters decide to break with tradition and head for New York City’s latest hotspot. Finding the place booked out, they pretend to be a no-show couple, the Tripplehorns, to get a table, and promptly run into two mobsters with whom the real Tripplehorns have history.
Thus begins a wild night which involve cameos from Mark Wahlberg as a good-looking security consultant and Ray Liotta as the mafia Mr Big. Throw in bent cops, amateur sleuthing, breaking and entering, and a hunt for a flash drive (that’s a ‘computer memory sticky thing’ to the uninitiated), and there’s plenty going on.
The Fosters are boring, buttoned-up types (they say ‘Eff you, you mother-effer’ rather than the expletive-laden version). But the leads are likeable, and given the horrendous state of the rom-com today, having characters you can root for goes a long way.
For some reason, I got the idea midway through the film that the Fosters were actually the Morrises, which meant that Steve Carell was playing the second character of a recent movie to be named Philip Morris, while Tina Fey was liable to be the subject of John Duggan’s song ‘I Fell Madly In Love With Clare Morris’. In fact, the tunes aren’t bad (it opens with ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ by The Ramones and finishes with ‘(Your Love Has Lifted Me) Higher and Higher’, but apparently no soundtrack has been released.
On (admittedly very rare) occasions, ‘Date Night’ is laugh-out-loud funny. “You have no idea what it’s like to be a teenage girl having your first period under Taliban rule,” Phil is told during a meeting of Claire’s (almost entirely female) book club – which, as ways to shut up a man go, takes some beating.
Still, it’s depressing that some of the biggest chuckles come from the out-takes at the end. Carell and Fey are both gifted improvisers, and it’s a pity that more risqué jokes didn’t make the cut – “Work that pole like a Russian immigrant,” Claire says as the closing credits roll. It’s one thing for the caper parts of the movie to edge out the laughs. It’s quite another for the best material to be deliberately left on the cutting-room floor in what is, after all, a comedy.
Towards the end, Claire admits that she only ever reads the first 30 pages and the final page of whatever tome the book club is studying. You won’t miss out on a whole lot if you do the cinematic equivalent with ‘Date Night’.
Rating 5 out of 10
