The film starts with a bright idea: what if Clark,
Ellen, and their teenage children Audrey (Dana Hill) and Rusty (Jason Lively)
won a European vacation on a game show called “Pig in a Poke?” Peter Canavese
said in his review, “Director Amy Heckerling (Fast Times at Ridgemont High,
Clueless) and screenwriters John Hughes (National Lampoon's Vacation) and
Robert Klane don't make much of the sequence, which clownishly puts the family
in pig costumes (to chants of "Be a pig! Be a pig!"), but it does
contain one of the film's precious few funny gags: in an edgy parody of Richard
Dawson's signature kiss, John Astin's Kent Winkdale takes liberties with teen
contestant Audrey. The pig motif is the first salvo of many that target the
Griswalds as boorish and destructive "ugly Americans." The first film
was content with gentle mockery of American suburbanites—and, by extension, the
audience—topped with a single surgical strike but in addition to lazily
reprising that gag, the sequel piles on scene after scene of Griswald idiocy
and ignorance.” In the first film, they were more often unlucky victims. In the
sequel, they’re more often victimizers.
There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the idea,
other than fixing what wasn’t broking. However, the satire doesn’t work: for
one thing, by spoiling boring stereotypes, the screenwriters become worse than
the Griswalds, who at least have the defense of ignorance, while Hughes and
Klane should know better. Canavese said, “The family has never been more
dysfunctional: Rusty gets caught drunk with a hooker, and Audrey is the butt of
a running gag about her eating disorder—not exactly hi-lar-i-ous material, at
least not without a more convincing unity of satirical action.” The waste of
the film’s list of “guest stars” gives a quick survey of “European’s Vacation”
entirely disorganized and seldom amusing procedure: Hecklerling gives nothing
memorable to Paul Bartel, Ballard Berkeley, Mel Smith, Robbie Coltrane, or Moon
Zappa. What’s really embarrassing is Eric Idle appears and actually says the
line “It’s just a flesh wound” during a sadly limp cameo. For Monty Python
fans, that hurts.
The family travels through London, Paris, a Bavarian
village, and Rome, as we eventually start to hate the family more and more which
hurts because we empathized with them in the first film. Canavese said, “The
family gets stuck in a Sisyphean roundabout, Clark dons lederhosen and does
full-contact polka dancing, and Ellen inadvertantly becomes a Euro-porn star.
Though it's no more than a music-video pastiche, a creatively edited Louvre
sequence sticks out like a sore thumb by actually attempting something. Okay,
there's also a Sound of Music parody in which Chase warbles a bit, and
Heckerling stages a skillful chase climax during the closing Roman segment.”
However, the latter is the fulfillment of the film’s extremely late,
halfhearted attempt to make up a plot (involving a couple of poorly motivated
kidnappers). It basically all brings it down to seeing Chevy Chase doing an
embarrassing dance.
What happened here? The first one was so hilarious,
but this one was half of what made the first movie so funny. If you loved the
first one, don’t see this sequel. You will not be able to make any sense of the
decisions they made.
I will not be reviewing the next film in the franchise
next week, because I think I will save that for a certain holiday. However, I
will be looking at the following disappointment in “National Lampoon Month.”
Sorry for posting this late. I was going to get started, but I fell asleep.
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