Adam Sandler has been criticized for choosing to make movies that are in major travel destinations so he can enjoy his days off from filming seeing the sights. It started with 50 First Dates filmed in Hawai’i and Blended was filmed in South Africa and The Do-Over was filmed in the Savannah area. I mean, as long as some studio or production company was throwing him millions and millions of dollars, have some fun. Hopefully, his agent and business manager enjoy a slice of that pie and it’s a big piece.
A movie like Vacation Friends 2 seems like the kind of movie Sandler would make. It’s filmed in Hawai’i and you can see how bored the actors were as they were wanted to just get through a day of filming to spend a night at a luau or the next day at the beach. The first Vacation Friends wasn’t exactly a comic masterpiece but it had its moments, mainly making John Cena the wild and crazy Ron while Lil Rel Howery as the more reserved Marcus. Some time has passed since the events of the first movie and they’re still the same, only worse.
Marcus is way too nitpicky and Ron is way too over the top. Meredith Hagner playing Ron’s wife, Kyla, seems to think the key to comedy is to scream as loud as she can and overact. So, it’s more like a Sandler comedy. Yvonny Orji plays Marcus’ wife, Emily, but her whole role is just to react and that’s basically all she does. Added to the cast this time around is Steve Buscemi as Kyla’s father, Reese Hackford, who’s just been released from prison and doesn’t like Ron.
Buscemi is a Sandler comedy regular himself and Buscemi has been funny in many roles. But the whole schtick on how he doesn’t like Reese is cliched and done to death before. Once the story develops into a story about Reese and some other people trying to recover money from a down plane, you know it’s going to end with Ron doing something to earn Reese’s respects.
There’s alos a subplot about Marcus trying to work on a meeting with a major business corporation run my Mrs. Kim (Julee Cerda) to build a five-star hotel in Chicago through his company. This means, Marcus spends most of his time tying to get into the good graces of Kim’s next-in-charge Yeon (Ronny Chieng doing the same thing he did in Crazy Rich Asians and M3GAN).
None of this is really interesting and to be honest, it’s not that really interesting to write about. The movie was written and directed by Clay Tarver who directed and co-wrote the first one, which had some good moments. It’s like Tarver took everything he discarded for the first script and decided to incorporate it in the sequel. It doesn’t work. Mainly because the characters are the exact same as they were in the previous.
There’s been no change except for an infant son for Ron and Kyla who is mostly taken care of by Maurillo (Carlos Santos) who spends most of his scenes in the background. If you thought the fake baby in American Sniper was bad, there’s several scenes here where you can clearly tell the actors are holding a doll wrapped up to look like a baby. I feel like Tarver must’ve realized the hardships of using babies in movies and decided it’d be best to leave as much out as they can and just fake it.
All in all, I sure hope they had a lot of fun in Hawai’i filming, because there’s nothing fun about this movie. If you just want some background noise, it might work.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 