Despite my proclivity to profane vernacular and a frank understanding of the world, I live a fairly unexciting life. My strongest drink of choice runs from a mimosa to a Long Island Iced Tea if I won’t be driving for more than forty-eight hours, which means rarely because of work. My drug of choice is Zyrtec or Ibuprofen. While I may champion others’ right to full sexual expression and am unafraid to boldly and frankly assess the world as it is instead of living in a fantasy world like my fundamentalist upbringing heralded, I’m personally conservative. Movies like Rough Night are not for me. I don’t have the slightest bit of interest in the girl movie ghetto that believes that girls being just as naughty as guys partying genre is sufficiently humorous. I was not interested in The Hangover or The Night Before so changing the main characters’ genitals is not going to suddenly make me love the movie.
I only decided to put Rough Night in my queue after I saw an article titled “Hollywood Made a White Version and a Black Version of the Same Movie” which compared trailers for Rough Night and Girls Trip. Even though Rough Night was released on DVD before Girls Trip, I waited until the latter was available so I could watch them both on the same night and draw my own conclusions. I would disagree with the thesis because one movie is actually good and seems rooted in reality, and the other one is such a movie-contrived mess that it seems unfair to rest that in the lap of white America. Responsible for Presidon’t and many atrocities, historical and ongoing, sure, but Rough Night is too far and unfair. I’m half white, and that half is not claiming this movie.
Rough Night relies heavily on the disposable sex worker trope. WHY is that a thing, and why is there a segment of the world that thinks that shit is funny!?! Call me a humorless liberal, but it wasn’t funny even if the twist is that the stripper is a man. The dissonance of the gravity of the situation and the inappropriate response is occasionally funny, but not enough to carry a movie. None of the women in this “comedy” resemble real people, but are poorly sketched archetypes: the lesbian activist, the bougie black bi, the insecure, pushy overweight woman and the straight laced main character.
In an odd reflection on politics, Rough Night seems to theorize that if Hillary Rodham Clinton would just do some coke and commit some salacious crimes, she could have won America’s heart, which I can definitively refute because right wing conspiracy theorists believe that she is a swinging lesbian who killed Vince Foster. Only bad boys are appealing and excused. Sorry.
Rough Night awkwardly signals its wokeness by making references to Marissa Alexander and Daniel Holtzclaw that inadvertently erases the blackness of the victims while a white lesbian woman black checks the bougie black bi for being affluent and materialistic, which are not mutually exclusive characteristics. The one hilarious moment that critiqued the nation is when Kate McKinnon’s character screams, “Everyone in America DOES have guns.”
The last 20 minutes, which includes the closing credits, of Rough Night is funny, mostly predicated on Scarlett Johansson being Black Widow in other movies. Is it enough to trudge through the preceding one hour twenty-one minutes, which mainly set up the joke grenades that finally explode at the end? Probably not, but there are hilarious moments before the denouement, usually involving Paul W. Downs, who plays her fiancé. If by some cruel twist of fate I were forced to live in this movie, I would hang out with him and his friends who believe a cure to feeling sick is getting “a soft cheese.” Yessssssss!!! These are my people and are far more relatable than any of the women in the movie. The underlying humor is the contrast of gender norms and reality.
Downs’ scenes in Rough Night are a perfect balance of sober, gentle reality confronting a fantasy of a dangerous underworld to fulfill his dreams and live fully that the rest of the film falls short in achieving. The societal critiques in his segments are hilarious, trenchant and pitch perfect without exploiting or erasing reality. When I later found out that Downs and Lucia Aniello, the director, wrote the film and have been professional and personal partners for a long time, it retroactively made sense why his segments in the movie are the best and redeemed this film from being a two to barely a three on a five star scale. Instead of going for big names with poor chemistry, Downs and Aniello should have relied on their experience for the humor.
Rough Night is a dreadful film made barely tolerable by McKinnon, Downs and brief appearances by Demi Moore. If you are a fan of the genre, then you will probably enjoy it more than I did, but if you are not a fan of this genre, I don’t think they make it worth wasting your time. Side note: I think McKinnon is prettier than ScarJo.