By Jonathan Fisher, April 11th, 2010
As a fan of Seinfeld, please humour me while I invoke that show in discussing Date Night. There is an episode from the eighth season of that show called "The Yada Yada". In that episode, George dates a woman who does what many of us often do, skipping the details of a story to hop immediately to the point of what she is saying. George helpfully demonstrates this by recounting to Jerry one such tale -- "I spent some time with my ex-boyfriend last night... yada yada yada... I'm really tired today."
I bring this up in relation to Date Night because it feels like the movie was 'yada yada'-ed at the script pitching stage. A nice, modest, married Jersey couple go out for dinner one night... yada yada yada... they become embroiled in a tangled web of gang warfare, political corruption and mistaken identity. Never mind the details. It'll star Steve Carell and Tina Fey, and it will be funny. Shut up and give me my money.
The problem is, of course, that the 'yada yada' of that above premise is actually rather important. So many of the details of Date Night just don't add up, and the entire movie could have been avoided pretty early on in the piece with a five-minute conversation between two rational people. I don't expect comedies to be airtight, necessarily. Nor do I necessarily expect them to be ultra-intelligent. But they should at least make sense on some basic level. Very little about Date Night makes sense, to the point that when you should be concentrating on the jokes, all you're concerned about is the mantra that up here's for thinking. The characters in this thing are very, very dim.
There's another rather basic rule of comedy that Date Night violates. If you say something as if it's supposed to be funny, it is very rarely funny. The trick of comedy is saying something as if you don't necessarily know that it's funny, or that you don't care if people laugh at it or not. Acting funny in a normal situation isn't funny. Acting normal in a funny situation -- now, usually, that's funny. Not a moment of screen time goes by in Date Night that doesn't beg us to laugh. Admittedly, the movie has two very funny and talented lead actors in Steve Carell and Tina Fey. Their respective sitcoms (The Office and 30 Rock) are among the funniest shows of the last several years. This movie has a pedigree. But it's just so packaged. Even its meagre attempt to paint the relationship that these two normal people have rings false. The movie even resorts to an obnoxiously placed John Mayer song to distract us from the fact that there's nothing beneath the cliche-riddled dialogue.
Date Night is good for one or two laughs. Mark Wahlberg has an amusing few moments as a topless computer whiz who aids the married couple in their quest to escape the corrupt police officers who believe that they are involved in a plot to bring down the city's corrupt D.A. J.B. Smoove, who is very funny as Leon in Curb Your Enthusiasm, has a funny cameo as a cab driver who inadvertantly gets caught up in the film's action.
Date Night was directed by Shawn Levy, the man who directed both Night at the Museum movies and both Pink Panther movies (I use the terms 'directed' and 'movies' loosely there -- they could easily be replaced with 'built' and 'products'). Shawn Levy is the go-to guy for gap-stuffing seat-fillers in Hollywood. You go to a Shawn Levy movie, you get a neatly packaged Hollywood parcel, practically devoid of risk or mental challenges. I'm not bringing the guy down by saying that -- it's just what he does. He makes a very good living and, I'm sure, makes a lot of people happy. The Pink Panther movies exist so that parents can say to their kids, "sit down, shut up and watch this for 90 minutes". They're critic-proof, and they should be. They're just part of the Hollywood economy. They, like Date Night, are almost deliberately built so that at the end of the night you can say to your housemates, "Tonight, I went out, had dinner, saw a movie... yada, yada, yada... I'm home now."
Date Night is a 'yada yada' movie. You've been warned.
Date Night Trailer:
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