There are quite a few reasons why I should have liked the ‘Rough Night‘. First of all, this is a girly version of the genre of movies in which a group of men meet a round number of years after graduating from high school or college to try to relive the madness of their youth and face the changes brought by the erosion of time, just for extraordinary things to happen and events to take the wrong turn. The film is directed by a woman – Lucia Aniello – who is a feature film debutante but an experienced author of many TV comedies and acted by a formidable team of comedy actresses that includes Scarlett Johansson, plus a short appearance by Demi Moore. So, there should be a lot of feminine comic energy in this gathering for an exclusively feminine weekend, which begins exuberantly and in which complications do not take long to appear. Unfortunately, my expectations were not confirmed. The main problem with the film is – in short – that it is not funny enough.
Where are the roots of the failure? Coming from the world of sitcomsLucia Aniello seems to enjoy the freedom of expression on the big screen in the absence of the constraints of peak hours, big networks programming. Her heroines behave in the same way, getting to Miami on a weekend of extreme fun, which also includes the bachelorette party for one of them. The ladies happily use four-letter words and consume huge amounts of alcohol and ‘recreational’ drugs. Unfortunately, their characters also have exactly the psychological depth of the heroines from TV series with 25-minute episodes. This superficiality could have been offset by more comic madness, but this is also missing. Each of the heroines of ‘Rough Night‘ have her own reasons not to feel at ease at this reunion after ten years, and the actresses also seem somewhat constrained to be permanently in the space of the villa where the reunion takes place. The enclosed space is another unnecessary legacy of the television genre. A corpse also appears, which can be a problem or a source of crazy comedy. This thread is not efficiently explored either, we have seen movies with more funny scenes in which the characters try to get rid of corpses. The beautiful and talented actresses who appear in ‘Rough Night‘ fail to save the text and situations from being of faint comic at best. The trailer and the still photos look much better and are funnier than the movie itself.