Date Night (**½)
Directed by: Shawn Levy Starring: Steve Carell, Tina Fey, Mark Wahlberg, Common, Jimmy Simpson, William Fichtner, Ray Liotta, James Franco, Mila Kunis, Taraji P. Henson, Kristen Wiig, Mark Rufallo
Seen: April 20th 2010
**½ Out of ****
For an action comedy, Date Night is pretty entertaining, but also a bit of a flash-in-the-pan, as the memories won’t last too long. Big parts of the thrill is delivered through frantic screaming and over-reaction to things such as ridiculous car chases and strange “preferences”, shall I call it.
Phil (Carell) and Clair (Fey) Foster are normal suburban parents who try to keep the passion alive with a weekly date night, but each week one of them forgets and the other one has to give in and quickly get ready. Their best friends Brad (Rufallo) and Haley (Wiig) Sullivan are on the verge of a divorce, which gives both of them reason to pause, if the Sullivan’s looked like such a normally perfect couple, how are they faring? In an effort to inject a bit of romance in their next date night, Phil takes Clair to the city for a splashy evening at the hip and happening new restaurant Claw, but they are too late for a table, and have no reservation. While they wait for the possibility of a table, Phil hears a waitress calling the name Tripplehorn for a table for two. When after repeated callings no-one claims the table, Phil claims that the Fosters are indeed the Tripplehorns, and they sit down for a high class dinner. As they enjoy the night, getting drunker by the minute, two men comes up to their table and tells them to get up and go outside with them. The two men, Armstrong (Simpson) and Collins (Common) turn out to be henchmen for mob boss Joe Miletto (Liotta), and they want whatever the Tripplehorns stole from them.
The evening turns into a wild chase for the Fosters, as they have to keep ahead of the game to stay alive; running from Armstrong and Collins while trying to find the actual Tripplehorns and recover what was stolen in an effort to stay alive. The Tripplehorns turn out to be a low-life couple called Taste (Franco) and Whippit (Kunis) with very little ambition and an odd sense of romance, and the Fosters only find them with the help of a Holbrooke Grant (Wahlberg), a security expert whom Clair somehow remembers out of her hundreds of previous clients as an estate agent. The night somehow also manages to get crazier than all you’ve just read.
The humour in Date Night ranges from side-splittingly funny to awkwardly unfunny, with Carell and Fey mostly at the top of their comedic game. Franco and Kunis are oddly entertaining and funny as two redneck small-time crooks, while Simpson and Common are menacing enough as the always chasing henchmen. Some situations are ridiculous even when viewed in the context of the movie, with a dancing-scene in a strip club standing out as particularly far-fetched. The action scenes serve only to support the comedy, and only entertain because of the way the comedy is milked out of them. Still, Date Night is a fairly entertaining comedy, and if you go see it for Carell and Fey alone you shouldn’t be disappointed, as this movie really is rather fun, and eventually the small romantic thread running through the movie, that of the somewhat doubted relationship between Phil and Clair, even though it is slightly too little too late, grounds the movie in something real and substantial.
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