I’d always been aware of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie’s Island Adventure but had never heard anything positive about it and had also decided that any film with a title as unwieldy as that couldn’t be good. This 2003 TV movie from director Nick Marck puts Randy Quaid’s ‘cousin’ Eddie character front and centre, marooning his family on an island just in time for Christmas.
Quaid’s dimwitted hick was easily a highlight of the previous ‘Vacation’ movies, a secret weapon who managed to raise big laughs in every scene he was in. Clearly, someone somewhere crunched the numbers and decided that this character could carry an entire movie. That someone was wrong. This is one of the crappiest, laziest Christmas films I’ve seen so far. I don’t expect much from a Chevy Chase-less made-for-TV sequel, but still - this one really sucks.
From the off Marck’s film is dumb, lacking the warmth, intelligence or deft touch of part one’s writer John Hughes. Eddie has fallen on hard times. He’s lost his experimental radiation testing job (to a monkey) right before Christmas and, even worse, the pipes in his family’s house have burst, during one of the clumsiest, overly drawn-out and unfunny ‘comedy’ sequences you’re likely to see.
In a mad twist of fate, when Eddie begs for his job back, the monkey takes bites him leading his ex-employers to buy his silence with a free family trip to a pacific island paradise. So Eddie and his clan, including grumpy Uncle Nick (Ed Asner) and niece Audrey (Dana Bannon, interestingly reprising the role she originally played in the original 1983 Vacation movie) are off on tour. In Hawaii, a shipwreck strands them on a desert island along with hot tour guide Mika Laka Miki (Lee Sung Hi) where they face the even bigger disaster of potentially missing Christmas.
Every joke feels lazy and forced, with even more focus on fart and poop gags than you could possibly imagine. It’s set up as an irreverent riff on Gilligan’s Island but that can only work if the jokes and set-pieces are up to scratch. In the earlier Vacation movies Eddie was always a bit slow, but the real genius of the character was that he was so squirm-inducingly oblivious to his redneck awfulness. “Daddy says I’m the best kisser”, indeed.
Here, Eddie’s just witless and clumsy, knocking stuff over and unwittingly causing accidents like Mr Magoo. Frustratingly, they can’t think of anything funny for him to say and his whole schtick mostly involves falling over or making other people fall over. It depresses me that they persuaded comedy legend Eric Idle to reprise his role from European Vacation, only to have him just fall over a few times. There’s also a painful reliance on gags involving family dog ‘Snot’ who - get this - stinks and farts a lot. Sigh.
Unforgivably, Cousin Eddie’s Island Adventure also doesn’t feel very Christmassy at all. There’s definitely a reason why few Christmas films take place on tropical islands. How this movie got made is a real mystery, though the biggest head-scratcher is how Barron had the chance to return for at least three Vacation movies and this mess is the one she chose to pop up in. Poor woman. I watch this one on my day off which will be a ‘Daddy-Daughter Day’. Enduring this garbage makes me actively look forward to four solid hours of playing with Play-doh.
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