Carell and Fey fare poorly in latest comedy

Meet Shawn Levy. He’s a Hollywood Director/Producer who’s made ten films, the likes of which include Just Married, Cheaper by the Dozen (two of them), The Pink Panther (two of them), and Night at the Museum (two of them). What do they all have in common? Aside from being laughable excuses for cinema, each has been branded “rotten” on the website Rotten Tomatoes, meaning critics found every single one of them bad enough to advise staying away.

Nevertheless, Date Night, Levy’s newest film, signals a shift in the critical tide. Not only has it been branded “fresh,” but convincingly so, scoring a whopping 66 percent positive rating from the site’s “top critics,” including positive reviews from pop culture geniuses like Claudia Puig, Peter Travers and Roger Ebert. So has Levy finally churned out a funny, quality film? Um, nope.

It’s not even close. Seemingly, the aura of titan TV comedians Steve Carell and Tina Fey have put blinders over the majority of the critical community and prevented them from seeing the material as banal, hackneyed and downright bizarre. The conflict is presented in a truncated, pre-packaged manner. The depth of the marital troubles consists of “I work hard all day. I clean the dishes. We go out once a week. It’s not the way it used to be.” Alright, not great stuff, but at least it allows its stars a chance to inject some needed vitality into the characters its script and direction fail to.

What follows, however, shatters any possible chance at a mild success. Suddenly, after a Hitchcockian case of mistaken identity, the couple becomes the target of a pair of crooked cops, the city’s DA, and a mob boss. It’s as if screenwriter Josh Klausner ran out of ideas for a dramedy about a sparkless married couple and thought: “You know what this script needs? Guns. Chase scenes. Stuff getting blown up. And oh yeah, more guns.” The combination doesn’t work by a long shot, either as a comedy or actioner, particularly because Levy doesn’t know what kind of movie he’s making.

At some points, like a goofy car chase where the couple gets latched on to a taxi cab, the tone is like something airing on ABC Family, evidenced by the use of Teddybears’ “Cobrastyle” for background music. Later, the couple is forced to strip and dance for the city’s DA, whose sexual turn-on’s are, at least, questionable. It’s a scene that belongs in a completely different film. Such juxtapositioning makes the film completely incongruous. Levy has no feel or understanding for needed continuities in tone or style. He’s aiming for lowbrow, through and through, wherever it takes his film.

I’m mad at myself for giving seven of my hard-earned dollars to this hack. I could have gone to see Roman Polanski’s new film, The Ghost Writer. How about the new Atom Egoyan, Chloe? I should have even driven to Blacksburg, VA to see Mother, the new film from the great Korean director Joon-Ho Bong, before helping him make another film. And so should you.
1 ½ out of 4.