Director: Stephen Kessler
Writer: Elisa Bell
Starring: Chevy Chase, Beverly D’Angelo, Randy Quaid
Synopsis: In the fourth outing for the vacation franchise, the Griswolds have to survive Vegas fever when they go to Las Vegas for a fun family vacation.
In the long history of movies nobody wanted or asked for, near the top of that list has to be Vegas Vacation, released twenty-five years ago in February 1997, a film with an existence so questionable even the National Lampoon in the title was dropped. If there was a trilogy that should’ve stayed a trilogy, it was the Vacation series, which has an excellent and highly quotable first entry (1983’s National Lampoon’s Vacation, directed by Harold Ramis), a lesser if underrated second entry (1985’s National Lampoon’s European Vacation, directed by Amy Heckerling), and a hugely beloved third entry that plays on millions of home television screens every December (1989’s National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, almost directed by Chris Columbus).
Something all three of these comedies have in common is John Hughes, who in the 1980s could pump out screenplays faster than most writers could pen a flash fiction short story—Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, for example, was reportedly written in its entirety in a single weekend. He didn’t direct any of the Vacation movies, but he put his stamp on those first three films in so many ways. His humor is almost always spot-on, and the escalating circumstances and wild problems Clark Griswold and his family continued to find themselves in is always worth multiple viewings.
The third entry looked to be a good place to stop, but lo and behold, eight years later the world got a fourth theatrical entry in the franchise with Vegas Vacation, a film that has its fans and isn’t by any means a complete waste of time, but unfortunately marks a giant drop in quality that hasn’t found favor with the passage of time. Some jokes still bring a smile to your face, like Christie Brinkley’s return as the woman in the Ferrari, and Clark being forced to climb up Hoover Dam. Beverly D’Angelo is a treasure like always, and Randy Quaid’s Cousin Eddie enlivens the proceedings, his presence sorely missed in the second installment.
But little in Vegas Vacation makes you laugh out loud, the story not focused so much on the family this time as a unit but instead on Clark’s gambling problems, Ellen’s crush on Wayne Newton, and the kids getting into trouble both in and around the casinos. The first three films work as well as they do because the family typically stays together, but in Vegas Vacation they’re so often apart, the actors and characters are often not compelling enough to carry comedic subplots on their own.
One of the biggest problems is the Chevy Chase performance, which doesn’t showcase the typical inspired insanity of his earlier comedies. Chase’s status in Hollywood was slowly dwindling throughout the 1990s, starting with flops like Nothing But Trouble and Memoirs of an Invisible Man, and continuing into his failed 1993 talk show and the lackluster Cops and Robbersons and Man of the House. By the time Vegas Vacation rolled around, his time as a leading man was all but over, and in some ways the film feels like a last-ditch effort at some relevancy for Chase, the comedy world having moved on by 1997 to Jim Carrey and others.
The film could have been far worse, of course—reportedly Chase’s idea for a fourth film was A Swiss Family Griswold, which would have stranded the family on a deserted island. The filmmakers also could have tried to replicate the same plot of the original Vacation, putting the family on another cross-country trip. Las Vegas is a city filled with so much possibility for any movie, let alone a Vacation movie, but I didn’t think back when I was twelve years old that enough was done with this screenplay written by Elisa Bell, and my feelings today haven’t changed.
Vegas Vacation always feels merely like a series of situations, never with a story we can care about, never with a narrative that has any forward momentum. Of course a lot of the problems with that middling narrative could be pushed to the wayside if the jokes were funny, but the soft PG rating hurts Vegas Vacation big time. There is nothing on display here like the raucous jokes of the R-rated first installment. Even National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, which so many families watch together during the holidays, has a ton of lewd sexual jokes and dark macabre humor that is almost never replicated in this fourth installment.
And the movie sadly gets worse as it goes along. The familiarity with the characters gives us enough to hold onto in that first so-so half-hour, but once the dubious plot sets into motion, there’s little to maintain our interest. The shrug-worthy finale is especially disappointing, the family having lost everything but managing to sit by the right person at the right time to see their problems evaporate in an improbable instant.
Now, to be fair, Vegas Vacation is better than some of the trash in this franchise that came after, like the direct-to-video Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie’s Island Adventure from 2003 and the criminally disappointing Vacation from 2015, which only had one funny scene involving Christina Applegate getting her drink on. Vegas Vacation is pleasant enough to play in the background of your living room while you’re busy doing other things, but this movie, a box office disappointment twenty-five years ago, is a mostly forgettable trifle that, at best, simply reminds you of all the better films worth watching in the franchise.
