Just watched this for the first time since it was in the theaters. Not funny. A slog even at 90 minutes.
shareI know this is a beloved movie and I normally don't poop on the classics, but the rewatch was SO difficult to get through. It has moments, but the premise gets tiresome after 45 minutes.
shareYou've seen it before, you know how it's going to end. Sometimes, for some people, that spoils the movie. If others here still love it year-after-year, then it's YOU, not the movie.
sharejust saw it with my 10 year old son and he said it wasnt that funny. I had to admit that there are only some gags and funny scenes but that there is a lot of scenes that where not funny or not that funny as intended...
I mean there is a 3-4 hour cut of this film and I nearly thought this one was too long anyway.
Dont get me wrong. I like the movie. I bought the Bluray. But somehow my son is right on that one....
I don't know. I LMAO almost the whole way through when I watch it every year. It's the stupid little things that add to the humor... like the title of the book Del is reading at the airport. And when they say that lady's baby came out sideways. The whole idea of someone making a living selling shower curtain rings. And relatable scenes like waiting in line while some lazy ass customer service worker ignores their job, having annoying people next to you on a plane, etc. A 10yr doesn't quite have all the life experiences yet to fully appreciate a lot of the humor in this movie.
shareWhy would your 10 year old son find a film about 2 adult men trying to get home for thanksgiving and encounting loads of journey problems on the way funny ? How could he even relate to that? Sounds like you place a little too much importance on his inexperienced opinion.
shareA lot of the humor may have been over his head.
sharei love how this dad is looking at his young son for approval on if he can laugh at a comedy movie
I loved it as a kid. Bought the blu ray a few years ago and found it… fine but not as good as I remembered. Then watched it again recently and loved it all over again.
It’s a strange one. I think the strength is the characters, the fantastic actors who play them, and the drama - the revelation at the end never fails to summon a throat-lump. It’s like the comedy is really secondary.
One reason people might find an 88 minute movie ‘a slog’ is that the pacing is off. It doesn’t have the tight three-act structure of a perfectly paced movie, they hacked out about 2/3 of the assembly cut so what you’re left with is a ticker-tape of Neil and Del going from one disaster to the next and it can get tiring.
I think the film veers into that territory but has enough deeper emotional currents to sustain interest, and the heart-wrenching/warming ending arrives just as the pattern starts to get a little repetitive.
I think the sub-plot of Neil’s wife suspecting he’s having an affair should have stayed in, it would have added to the stakes, upped the drama, and made sense of her emotional state at the end - which seems a little overblown for a wife whose husband is… a couple of days late 🤷🏻♂️
Good observations.
shareI did not find it that funny nor good even in 87.
shareI thought it was great. Martin did a great job of playing the straight man and Candy was equally brilliant.
shareTry him in Dirty Rotton Scoundrels instead. That's still a great movie.
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