Movie Review: Rough Night

Reunions with old school friends can be tough. Sorry: Rough.

Do you still have anything in common? Does their reflected nostalgia remind you of how far you’ve diverged from your youthful dreams? Can you rely on them to help hide a dead body? And can they just not tag you in any unflattering Facebook photos?

Rough Night comes from the writers of Broad City and asks those very questions—though mainly the ones about the dead body and the FB tags—with the piercing, unforgiving comic edge of their TV show.

The answer? Get you a friend who can do both.

Scarlett Johansson plays Jess, an aspiring state senator and bride-to-be who reluctantly agrees to a hen’s weekend in Miami, organised by her clingy college roommate, Alice (Jillian Bell). In Florida, they reunite with Frankie (Ilana Glazer) and Blair (Zoe Kravitz), ex-lovers and the other two parts to their friendship cocktail. Libations are had. Substances are consumed. Synchronised dance routines are performed.

But Jess, committing a classic group-hang faux pas, offends the manic Alice by inviting an interloper: her Aussie mate Pippa (Kate McKinnon). Later, an encounter with a stripper turns fatal and they’re left figuring out how to hide his fast-stiffening bod, wary of the swinging neighbours (Ty Burrell, Demi Moore) snooping on their shenanigans. The trick will be to not let their simmering frustrations with one another distract them from the task at hand: jet-skiing the corpse to his watery grave. #squadgoals?

Risk

So, this is dark stuff! Comparisons have been made to Very Bad Things, the pitch-black “satire” from the 1990s in which a female stripper is accidentally killed by a group of drunk bachelors. Rough Night, to its credit, walks back the from the brink of total nihilism by retroactively justifying the accidental murder, which will at least make the movie more palatable for any reasonable person who draws the line at laughing over the death of innocent sex workers.

It also demonstrates how far we’ve come since Very Bad Things, which didn’t really bother much with, you know, the basic tenets of human compassion.

For that we can thank the skilled Lucia Aniello, the first female director to helm a raunchy American comedy in nearly two decades. Though her film fits a conventional template (I was reminded of Ruthless People), it ultimately feels different, partly because of the female lens through which the revelry is depicted. It’s why Wonder Woman, also conventional, shone too. When you’re so used to seeing dudes bro-down, any slight alternatives immediately stand out from the pack. And it makes this man-murdering party... empowering? Okay, maybe that's taking it a step too far. Still, Rough Night is a refreshing change of pace.

Aniello and co-writer Paul W. Downs (who co-stars, hilariously, as Jess’ sweet, obscenely-devoted fiancée) pepper their script with the same lively, timely and unexpected asides that have made Broad City—and its many GIFs—a rosetta stone to understanding millennial self-involvement, social consciousness and wit. Johannsson, in her first comedy in too long, and Kravitz, the one least familiar with this world, fit in well with their rhythms, alongside Glazer, a Broad City lead, and McKinnon, a comic powerhouse who cannot even be stopped by a shaky Australian accent. All five share excellent chemistry, although, I'll admit, Bell’s once giddy-making shtick is growing tired, fast.

But how’s this for a twist? She's given the picture's best dramatic moment, and she lands it. At the end of Rough Night’s 101 minutes, you’re convinced you’d sit through another 101 with the same quintet. If they could make a sequel to Weekend at Bernie’s, why not this? Puppeteered dead bodies deserve big screen representation too.

3.5/5

In cinemas now. Rated MA15+ for Strong crude sexual humour, coarse language and drug references.