Game Night

Game Night begins as a surprisingly amusing film about a group of young urban professionals who gather weekly to play board games, charades, and things like Pictionary.  The group consists of three couples, all of them attractive, sophisticated (except for one hunky guy who is an idiot) and not overly invested in the mild, PG-rated entertainment in which they indulge.  Lurking around the edges of "game night" are a couple of solitary males -- a sad, dorky policeman whose wife has just left him and the brother of one of the men, a sketchy dude with way more money than is seemly.  Both of these men take the amusements too seriously with dire consequences -- for them, "game night" is not merely a diversion but a forum for competition that is intimately entwined with their fragile sense of self-worth.  The film shows "game night" escalating into competition made vicious by higher stakes -- a Sting-Ray sports car is the prize.  One of the group rents some actors from a "murder mystery" service and stages a kidnapping with the sports car as prize to the couple who solves the crime and rescues the ostensible kidnapping victim first.  Of course, the kidnapping turns out to be committed in earnest and there are real bad guys -- shoot-outs and car chases ensue, pretty standard stuff I'm sorry to report and the film goes swiftly downhill once the murders and brawls cease being play-acted.  In effect, there are two movies -- a witty and ingenious comedy about spoiled Yuppies idly amusing themselves with ironically retrograde board games and light sexual banter, and, then, an increasingly frenzied and brutal crime picture comprised of nothing but stupid caricatures.  Before things turn serious and the dialogue stops cracking wise but instead is clogged with various moral precepts, the film is a solid B minus comedy -- not too brazen, but sufficiently clever and closely observed to be continuously amusing.  When the movie takes a turn toward seriousness, it collapses and, in fact, ends up virtually unwatchable.  (One defect is the screenwriter's use of dire situations to stage extended dialogue -- in one scene, characters whisper back and forth interminably while only a few feet away the other couples are being threatened with gangland-style execution.  It's as if neither the criminals nor their victims are aware that the two brothers are conducting an Uncle Vanya style dialogue within ear-shot about ten feet away.)  The film also retreats from what seems to be its premise -- that is, that increasing the prize from nothing at all to a late-model sports car will induce all sorts of wicked and irrevocably despicable behavior on the part of the Yuppies.  In fact, the increasing violence and peril that the film heaps upon its protagonists don't affect them adversely at all -- they just become just more witty, fey, and sensitive; the notion is that adversity forges character, an idea I've always thought highly suspect.  Accordingly, an interesting, if time-honored theme -- the beast lurking beneath the mask of gentility -- is suggested, even, framed for presentation, but, then, inexplicably rejected.  All six members of the game night group remain pleasant, conventionally moral, and, in fact, are shown playing Pictionary once more at the end with the two sinister male isolates now redeemed by being welcomed into the group.  For the first hour, the film seems about to take some significant risks, but it's handsome young actors don't want to look bad and aren't willing to engage in any behavior that's too reprehensible and, so, the implicit threat that the members of the group will turn on one another is softened by the injection of outsider and highly conventional bad guys into the plot.  No one succumbs to temptation and becomes wicked -- the wicked men are outside of the group and, in fact, not even really Americans:  they seem to be sinister Bulgarian mobsters.  It's a shame that the film fails because, at least, one scene convincingly straddles the divide between horror and comedy:  one of the protagonists played by Justin Bateman has been shot in the arm.  Rachel McAdams playing Bateman's wife looks at You-Tube on her phone and uses that information to attempt to extract a bullet from the injured man's forearm.  You Tube tells her to get some hard liquor as an anesthetic (and antiseptic) agent.  She buys a bottle of "very drinkable Chardonnay" and, then, proceeds to hack open her husband's arm while both of them try to suppress their gag reflex.  It's horrible and funny at the same time and a brief glimmer of a better, tougher movie lurking under the conventional date-night comedy here on offer.  This 2018 release, directed by John Dale and Jonathon Goldstein, sit-com alumni, looks like a made-for TV movie and feels similar in form -- it's fundamentally mild-mannered and good-natured, a device for conveying certain truisms about family and relationships upon which everyone will most certainly agree.