Movie Review: "Game Night" Gives Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams a Trivial Pursuit

Movie. Two words. Sounds like ‘almost every other recent comedy’.

Having exhausted annual events like New Year’s Day, Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, Hollywood has begun turning to sporadic, generic milestones—Fist Fight, Rough Night—and occasional gatherings—Girls Trip, Office Christmas Party and now Game Night—for their settings.

What about when they run out of those? Maybe there’s an ensemble flick in a movie about people who have the same birthday? (Wait, that was technically the pilot to This Is Us.) Okay, fine, how about a film called Wednesday, and it’s about a bunch of people who bump into each other on a random Wednesday? It may sound dumb, but hey, the days of the week are our last chunks of unexploited IP!

Future Wednesday star Jason Bateman leads Game Night, which is helmed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, the screenwriters of Bateman’s Horrible Bosses saga and directors of 2015’s Vacation reboot. You have to give them this: Their projects are exactly what they say on the tin.

Bateman and Rachel McAdams play Max and Annie, a married couple with a competitive streak who host a weekly ‘game night’ with their pals: childhood sweethearts Kevin (Lamorne Morris) and Michelle (Kylie Bunbury), and dim-witted Ryan (Billy Magnussen), who brings along another even-dimmer date each time, though savvy new girl Sarah (Sharon Horgan) might finally deliver him victory. Next door lives Gary (Jesse Plemons), a lonely cop with a chilling cadence who was once a regular at ‘game night’ but got disinvited after an ugly divorce from Max and Annie’s friend. What happened to their friend goes unexplained, so we’ll leave that to any ‘fan-fiction’ writers inspired to expand the Game Night-iverse.

In a piece of perfect casting, Kyle Chandler plays Max’s older brother, Brooks (it’s not just that Chandler and Bateman look similar; they’re also refugees from Netflix shows you’re not sure you watched). Brooks is a wealthy Wall Street trader whose success is hurting Max’s sperm motility (yeah, this part of the plot is probably not worth getting into). When he blows into town and invites the gang over for a ‘game night’ they’ll never forget, Max and Annie pledge to beat him once and for all. However, his promise of a staged ‘kidnapping’ they’ll have to solve gets twisted when he is seemingly kidnapped for real by underworld figures. Not that Max, Annie and company notice at first. While Brooks is getting beaten up and dragged away, they dig into the cheese plate and watch on in delight.

The Game and, ahem, Charade are probably the closest comparisons, though, spiritually, Game Night is more reminiscent of Clue, the underloved board game adaptation from the 1980s, as well as Three Amigos, in which a trio of screen action heroes find themselves unwittingly pulled into an actual gunfight, not realising, for far too long, the gravity of their dangerous situation. Same goes here, with Max and Annie waving what they believe to be a fake gun in the faces of some bikies (thinking they’re theatre-folk) to find Brooks. Screenwriter Mark Perez may have even been influenced by Bateman’s Arrested Development, with one—or some—characters fulfilling a similar role to the lesson-teaching J. Walter Weatherman.

Of course, all I’m doing now is listing features and TV shows significantly funnier than Game Night, and which find better things for their actors to do. Bateman’s everyman shtick gets another workout in this, and it still works fine, while McAdams is having her goofiest best time since, well, About Time. But when the script runs out of surprises, it leans on running jokes of varying quality (the best involves a bit about glass tables, not to mention a solid, slow-burn and inexplicable stream of references to the pictures of 1999). Plus, Morris and Bunbury are wasted in a subplot about Denzel Washington, which is just an extended, roundabout excuse for Morris’ (okay, excellent) impression, while the biting Horgan and magnetic Magnussen are quickly relegated to the background.

And yet! Would it shock you to learn Game Night is one of the most audacious-looking comedies of recent years? Ingeniously, Daley and Goldstein bring the tale to visual life as if it were a board game itself, pulling back the camera to make tiny houses on a street look like properties on a Monopoly board, and the characters themselves as if they were tokens in The Game of Life. Cinematographer Barry Peterson (aided by some well-integrated CGI) often makes everyone appear like a pawn in a larger, unseen game. It’s not visual poetry, but it sets Game Night apart.

As the evening gets darker for the sextet, the directors begin toying with tropes from video games and virtual reality, with an elaborate, single-take sprint across a mansion, and finally a car chase with the camera locked in the floating POV from Grand Theft Auto. As a comedy about some low-key friends who love low-stakes games, Game Night is distracting enough. But as an unlikely action spoof? Yahtzee.

3/5

In Australian cinemas 22 February. Rated MA15+ for strong comedy violence.

Photo: Roadshow Films