REVIEW: Game Night

Courtesy of New Line

Turning David Fincher’s underrated The Game into a comedy sounds like a terrible idea on paper. But somehow screenwriter Mark Perez and directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein pull it off with Game Night, reshaping that movie’s cool premise into a fun, weird and frequently hilarious adventure.

The marketing didn’t exactly fill me with hope. However, in hindsight, that’s clearly because it’s tough to communicate the film’s oddball combination of high-concept plot and situational humor in a quick two-minute trailer. It’s much easier to just show off the impressive cast, some of them genre mainstays and others stretching their comedy muscles for the first time in a while.

Max (Jason Bateman) and Annie (Rachel McAdams) are a highly competitive married couple who look forward to their weekly game night with friends. The core group includes high school sweethearts Kevin (Lamorne Morris) and Michelle (Kylie Bunbury), as well as dim pretty boy Ryan (Billy Magnussen) and whatever blonde Instagram model he’s currently dating. However, this particular game night gets off to an unusual start for a few reasons.

First, Ryan’s date of the week turns out to be a charming, intelligent Irish woman (the wonderfully droll Sharon Horgan) instead of a vapid dingbat. Next, Max’s charismatic, handsome older brother Brooks (Kyle Chandler) is in town, reigniting a decades-long sibling rivalry. Hoping to make Max look bad in front of his wife and friends, Brooks arranges a challenge that’s a bit more intense than Pictionary or Scrabble.

He sets up a kidnapping mystery, complete with actors playing federal agents and home invaders. Somebody in the group will be snatched, and the first couple to solve the case will win Brooks’ classic Corvette Stingray. However, when two masked men burst through the door and abduct Brooks for real, it takes a while for everyone else to realize it’s not part of the game.

Now, Max, Annie and their friends only have a few hours to learn what kind of shady deals Brooks was involved in and track him down. The good news is their next-door neighbor (Jesse Plemons) is a dedicated cop. The bad news is they’ve been excluding him from their game nights for months because he’s creepy and they like his ex-wife better. Will they be able to convince him to put aside their differences to save someone’s life?

Perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay Game Night is that I didn’t want the plot to kick in. I could’ve honestly just watched these characters hang out, shoot the breeze and play board games for two hours. The actors are so compelling and funny that I would’ve been fine without the car chases and surprisingly violent gunplay.

Don’t get me wrong, Daley and Goldstein handle the film’s high-concept elements in a way that feels effortless (and earned them the directing gig for DC’s upcoming Flash movie). But when the movie shifted gears, I found myself thinking, “Oh, right. It’s time for this now.”

That’s a credit to Perez’s caustic screenplay and a stunningly deep bench of comedic performers. Practically everyone knows how funny Bateman is and fans of Fox’s New Girl have long known about Morris’ distinctive brand of dry humor. However, it seems like people forget that McAdams can be hilarious too. She did play Regina George, after all. Mean Girls might’ve been 14 years ago, but McAdams’ timing is sharp as ever.

Chandler is also quite strong, instilling his character with much more nuance than one might expect from a silly comedy. But Plemmons and Magnussen are the MVPs of Game Night, no contest.

Plemmons is incredible at playing creepy, deadpan humor, so his interactions with Bateman and McAdams are a feast of weird, awkward comedy. Bonus: as a die-hard Friday Night Lights fan, it was also great to have a brief Coach Taylor/Landry-Lance reunion since Chandler and Plemmons share a few scenes together.

Magnussen, the movie’s other big scene-stealer, has built a solid career of playing dumb guys (in addition to his work here, he also played a dimwitted prince in Into the Woods and Kato Kaelin on American Crime Story). Some might view that as an insult, but it’s actually high praise. You have to be really smart to play stupid as well as he does. His brilliant work in a scene where he attempts to bribe a secretary had me laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe.

Like most high-concept comedies, Game Night falters a little bit in the third act when it’s time to tie up all the dangling plot threads. Still, even the filmmakers seem to acknowledge that’s a perfunctory part of the genre, because they quickly clear the table and wrap things up with one last funny game night. They also hint at the possibility of a sequel, which would normally make me groan. However, if they can get this cast back together, I’d be willing to give it a shot.

Game Night is rated R for language, sexual references and some violence.

Grade: B