Games People Play: GAME NIGHT

Game Night is comedy played fast and tight, an action thriller paced like a farce and overflowing with choice one-liners and witty banter. It’s a hoot. My favorite running joke involves various characters over the course of one-crazy-night falling into surprisingly sturdy glass tables. There’s such a satisfyingly goofy thunk as a body goes bouncing off where every other movie would give us a pleasing shattering smash. The action around this funny thread – just one of many, and besides the movie is so fast-paced all the jokes could count as running jokes – involves a group of friends whose weekly get-together goes very, very wrong. A competitive husband and wife (Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams) find their game night (pals played by Billy Magnussen, Sharon Horgan, Lamorne Morris, and Kylie Bunbury) invited to a murder mystery night by his rich, arrogant brother (Kyle Chandler). But, on the night in question, before the man can even explain all the rules past the ominous “it will look real,” actual criminals barge in, beat him up, and kidnap him. Now the group jets off on what they think is a scavenger hunt to find where a group of actors have taken him, but are instead pulled deeper and deeper into a black market conspiracy where the guns, blood, cops, criminals, car chases, and stolen goods are all-too real. 

Directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein (helming a superior project to their Vacation) take seriously the goofy script by Mark Perez (The Country Bears, improbably enough). Watch with the sound off and you might convince yourself you’re watching a Fincher knockoff. The shots are crisp, the violence bruises, and the lighting is dramatic shadows and rain-slick streets. But then there is the rapid-fire patter of bickering friends, treating it with all the tension and drama that’d be a little exaggerated were it a game of Monopoly or Trivial Pursuit, but is dramatically underplayed given the life-and-death situation of which they’re barely aware. Gradually, as they realize how in-over-their-heads they really are, the comedy is in the sudden scared flailing they have to keep in check in order to survive the night. That they’re also still so competitive that they can’t help but continue sniping little digs at one another is a fine touch. Beyond the high-energy excitement and the high-spirited joke-a-minute dialogue shot through with visual wit and whimsy – game board tilt-shift establishing shots; composited one-take mad-dash chases – the movie finds itself smartly rooted in the genuine affection of its participants. No matter how harried and dangerous the proceedings become, Bateman and McAdams are allowed to keep the suspense entirely out of their relationship. They’re a close-knit pair, clearly in love, adorably competitive with one another in a way that shows them to be enjoying playing the games because they actually like each other. The same extends to the friend group itself, which might get at each other’s throats, but never more than any gathering around the Sorry board. Even when a thug gets bloodily killed, there’s a nod to the stakes without skipping a laugh. This is big, broad, studio comedy-making operating at a consistently entertaining high.

The Shop Around the Corner: BARBERSHOP: THE NEXT CUT

It has been twelve years, but now the shaggy hangout vibe of the Barbershop comedies is back for a third time. It’s also the best one yet. Set in the same small independent black-owned barbershop on the south side of Chicago, Barbershop: The Next Cut gives up on being a movie and instead brings the charm as a big screen sitcom. This frees it up to be a comfortable location for staging sharply observed and warmly felt social commentary comedy, sparkling with smart sociological sentiment and compassionate character work. It’s written by veterans of TV comedy Kenya Barris (Black-ish) and Tracy Oliver (Survivor’s Remorse), who recognize the film’s strength is in making the barbershop a place we want to relax in, enjoying our fly-on-the-wall status as the various barbers, customers, and neighborhood regulars wander through. It’s a big-hearted welcoming movie with serious topics on its mind, but a light touch making it all go down easy.

The shop’s owner (Ice Cube, the series' nice center) is continuing in his father’s footsteps, making the establishment a gathering place for its employees and clients to shoot the breeze while getting their hair done. It’s a great location for a comedy, allowing a variety of characters to interact, talk out their differences, engage in funny banter, squabble and argue, fret and worry about the issues of the day, and find a way to work together. The barbershop is a stage for debates and riffs, parallel stand-up sets in progress punctuated by teasing chitchat. It now shares space – and rent – with the neighborhood beauty shop, which lends the proceedings an element of battle-of-the-sexes, but not in any reductive way. The result is merely one more outlet for a joking collision between various points of view, where the film draws its energy as an appealing clash of charismatic personalities.

The men (like old irritable Cedric the Entertainer, grayed and wrinkled by talented artists, and younger guys like Common, Lamorne Morris, and Utkarsh Ambudkar) and the women (including Regina Hall, Eve, and Nicki Minaj) have an interesting dynamic, dredging up usually unspoken resentments and deconstructing modern gender dynamics from surprising angles. The film lets them have their disagreements, finding common ground where it can and respecting their differences where it can’t. It’s fair that way, a safe space that allows them to discuss beauty standards, race relations, gang activity, gun violence, police misconduct, respectability politics, small business struggles, and more. It’s an amiable peacekeeping movie, not afraid to get serious when it needs to. The film finds a Chicago in pain, wracked with problems – homicides, poverty, broken institutions – people seem at a loss to fix. And yet there’s hope, positing that even small gestures of goodness can make a difference.

You can think of it as Chi-raq’s little cousin, and not because that’s what director Malcolm D. Lee is to Spike. Funnily enough, though it is less cinematically ambitious or angrily satirical, Barbershop: The Next Cut is a more consistent film, and no less politically engaged. It doesn’t take big swings, but it connects every time. Malcolm D. Lee is skilled with juggling tones and tracking motivations across a wide ensemble. (His Best Man Holiday, for example, is one of the better comic melodramas of late.) Here he weaves a deft dance of stereotype and insight, following not so much a story as it is loose strands of subplots woven together – romances, relationships, parenting problems, jealousies, business moves, and gang violence. He allows the characters to express a range of opinions, doubts, and conflicts, examining them in a casual, low-key, often-amusing tone well balanced with seriousness.

Though the look is sitcom bright and simple, there is heavy drama here. One dramatic subplot finds Cube’s son (Michael Rainey Jr.) drawing close to a gang leader (Tyga) who wants a new recruit. But there is also the lightest of light touches. Cut to J.B. Smoove as a smooth talking one-stop-shop with the kind of patter only he can bring, Anthony Anderson as a loud food truck entrepreneur, or Deon Cole as a daffy customer who seems to never leave, and we’re in a much sillier range. Like Black-ish, currently finishing its terrific second season on ABC, The Next Cut comes from a clear perspective, with great specificity to its humor and wearing a social consciousness on its sleeve. This animates and bolsters its attempts to present honest conversation in a way that keeps the comedy flowing without short-changing its important topics. The movie's appeal is best represented in the wheezing bluster of Cedric the Entertainer, whose elderly barber loves to mix it up with the youngsters and never seems to have a customer. (That memorably changes in a priceless scene in the end credits.) He just loves hanging out in this barbershop, and it’s easy to see why.