TOM TANGNEY

Date Night – Better to Stay Home

Apr 9, 2010, 6:46 AM | Updated: Mar 28, 2011, 3:51 pm

datenight

With the right material, Steve Carell and Tina Fey can be two of the funniest people on the planet. Week in and week out, THE OFFICE and 30 ROCK provide them with top-notch scripts and a strong ensemble cast that allow its two stars to shine as brightly as any TV stars in the firmament. Fey, of course, created 30 ROCK and, within the tightly wound scripts of THE OFFICE, Carell is given a lot of leeway to improvise. So their personal stamp is all over the finished product.

Given how slack DATE NIGHT is, it’s hard to imagine either Carell or Fey having much say in what shows up on the screen. In fact, the only inspired thing about this film is its pairing of Fey and Carell. So natural do they appear to be with each other, it’s surprising to realize they’ve never before acted together.

It’s that very naturalness that makes them initially quite convincing as married parents, exhausted married parents. They nicely capture the marital malaise that so often characterizes over-extended couples. In a telling scene, Carell and Fey both collapse on the couch after a hard day at work. When a babysitter suddenly shows up to take care of their kids for a pre-arranged “date night,” the couple look at each other with bemused resignation and finally rouse themselves enough to head out on their date. The great joke is their big night out consists of nothing fancier than dinner at one of those rather homely neighborhood family restaurants they probably take their kids to all the time.

These comically human moments characterize the early (and best) part of the film but they are soon engulfed by a much broader and more manic comedy style. DATE NIGHT wants to ramp up the humor by sending the couple on a wild and crazy night in the Big Apple. Following a reservation mix-up that leads to a case of mistaken identity, Carell and Fey spend the rest of the movie trying to escape from a couple of corrupt and bad-ass cops. This leads to a series of shoot-outs and car chases that aren’t so much exciting as they are silly (and not in any funny way.) These dirty cops are about as dangerous as the bad guys in the HOME ALONE movies, so there’s never any question of tension in the movie either. And if that isn’t enough, the movie grinds to a complete and utter halt mid-escape, when the couple decides to have another argument about their marriage. This inopportune fight might have found comic gold if it had offered something fresh and witty but no. It’s the same-old routine: wife bitches, husband complains he can’t seem to do anything right in her eyes, and she admits she hates having to be so bitchy all the time. Yawn. (It almost makes one yearn for another inane car chase.)

There are occasional moments of humor that break through the high-concept NYC nonsense, moments when Fey and Carell get a chance to be their witty and awkward selves. They are almost always the result of what appear to be improvised, almost throwaway scenes. An extended scene with a shirtless and ripped Mark Wahlberg as a former client of Fey’s who clearly still has a thing for her (and even more so vice versa) allows Fey and Carell to stretch those improvisatory muscles. Another good scene is the verbal pissing match our two heroes get into with the stoner couple whose reservations they’ve stolen. But these scenes are far outnumbered by the standard action-comedy bits seen in every lame Hollywood offering.

Throughout the movie, Tina Fey keeps saying they’re just a boring married couple from New Jersey but the real joke is that this boring couple is a lot funnier than all those hyper-hijinks they get into in Manhattan. The problem is DATE NIGHT doesn’t get the joke.

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Date Night – Better to Stay Home