This week Hulu has released its new comedy sequel Vacation Friends 2 from 20th Century Studios, which reunites the cast from the first film for another fun-in-the-sun getaway with some unpredictable hijinks. I was invited to an advance screening of the film on a hotel rooftop in West Hollywood, making for a very pleasant and unique setting.
I will say right off the bat that I am not the target audience for this type of movie. It’s an extremely broad comedy with sitcom-esque tropes that will likely appeal to those who wish Adam Sandler and his pals would make more entries in the Grown Ups franchise, or maybe parents who have an evening off from the kids and want to indulge in something that’s rated “R” for the sake of being R-rated. Vacation Friends 2 starts off with Marcus (Lil Rel Howery, best known as the friend in Get Out and the friend in Free Guy) and his wife Emily (Yvonne Orji from Insecure) still on good terms with the… let’s say offbeat married couple of Ron and Kyla (ex-WWE superstar / Peacemaker headliner John Cena and Search Party’s Meredith Hagner). They’re even friendly enough now that they’re all willingly going on vacation together as a belated shared honeymoon, but Marcus has an ulterior motive for traveling to a resort in the Caribbean that he inexplicably doesn’t share with his chums. He plans to make a deal with the resort’s Korean owners to build a new property in Chicago, though the son of the group’s founders (Ronny Chieng from Crazy Rich Asians) has other plans in mind. Coming along for the ride is Gentefied’s Carlos Santos as Maurillo, the hotel manager from the first entry who has now been hired as Ron and Kyla’s babysitter in exchange for a free trip. I guess he was a popular enough character that they had to find whatever flimsy excuse for him to be in the sequel.
Anyway, the first act is filled with Ron and Kyla just continuing to be awful, obnoxious people, so much so that it’s hard to fathom anyone wanting to spend any time around them at all, even though that’s ostensibly the premise of these movies. But the misadventures really begin when Kyla’s father Reese (my favorite legendary character actor Steve Buscemi from Fargo, whose presence here is the only real saving grace) shows up unexpectedly, having recently been released from prison– or so he claims. From that point on Reese keeps getting himself tangled up in situations that seem illicit at first, but which he is able to quickly explain away as gifts or ways by which he is helping to celebrate his daughter’s wedding. That could be a funny premise, but the writers and director of Vacation Friends 2 struggle to find anything clever to do with it. In fact, I only counted three times I chuckled to myself during the movie– once when Howery’s character is pressured into going surfing and wipes out immediately, once when Cena aggressively barges into subbing for Howery in a drinking contest, and once near the end of the film when it briefly looks as though all these tremendously unlikeable characters might drown together.
Yeah, so there’s not a whole lot to like about Vacation Friends 2, which feels less like a movie and more like the worst episode of Three’s Company you’ve ever seen expanded to feature length. However, I will say I was able to fully appreciate the scenery during my nighttime outdoor screening, frequently finding my attention drifting over to the skylines of Century City and Santa Monica in the background. But unfortunately most viewers won’t be able to watch that film in the same setting, so I’d suggest skipping it altogether unless you’re a really big fan of the first one– or if, like the character of Marcus, you’re somehow in favor of the masochistic idea of spending lots of time with people who are really, really annoying.
Vacation Friends 2 is now available to stream, exclusively via Hulu.
My grade: 1 out of 5 exploding fuel-less airplanes