The Tartan Prancer is an Albanian minivan with too many buttons and no clear purpose. That is the joke Vacation keeps making, and it wears out fast.
Trailer, via Warner Bros. UK & Ireland.
Rusty Griswold Flies for Econo-Air
Vacation is a 2015 comedy road movie written and directed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein. Ed Helms plays Rusty Griswold, now a pilot for the low-budget regional airline Econo-Air. He lives in suburban Chicago with his wife Debbie (Christina Applegate) and their two sons: James, 14, shy and awkward, played by Skyler Gisondo, and Kevin, 12, who bullies and torments his brother, played by Steele Stebbins.
Rusty’s friends Jack and Nancy Peterson will not stop talking about their family trip to Paris. So Rusty skips the annual cabin trip to Cheboygan, Michigan — which his family privately calls Cheboring — and plans a drive from Chicago to Walley World, just like the trips he remembers taking with his parents and sister.
A Sequel to Vegas Vacation
This is the sixth film in the Vacation series and a sequel to Vegas Vacation (1997). Warner Bros. Pictures released it on July 29, 2015. Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo return as Clark and Ellen Griswold; when their casting was reported in 2013, it was described as most likely a torch-passing cameo. Leslie Mann plays Rusty’s sister Audrey. Chris Hemsworth plays Stone Crandall, Charlie Day plays Chad, and Norman Reedus plays a trucker.
The casting history is more interesting than the finished film. Anthony Michael Hall, Johnny Galecki and Ethan Embry were all offered the chance to reprise Rusty. The record does not say whether they passed or the production did. Before Helms locked the part, Will Ferrell, Nick Swardson, Jason Sudeikis, Adam Sandler, Dwayne Johnson, Ashton Kutcher, Dax Shepard, Michael Rosenbaum, Jack Black, Rob Huebel, Jason Segel, Justin Theroux and Danny McBride were considered for the role. Keegan-Michael Key and Regina Hall were cast as family friends of the Griswolds. Tim Heidecker, Nick Kroll, Kaitlin Olson and Michael Peña signed on as Four Corners cops.
Memphis, Arkansas, Plano
The road trip runs on detours. In Memphis, Debbie’s past surfaces: she was a Tri Pi sorority sister known as “Debbie Do Anything.” She tries to prove she was the rebellious one by running an obstacle course drunk. It does not go well.
At a motel, James meets Adena (Catherine Missal), a girl he spotted from the highway. Rusty’s attempt to play wingman scares her off. In Arkansas, a woman in a Ferrari gets hit by a semi truck. A “helpful” local leads the family to a hidden hot spring that turns out to be a raw sewage dump. They come back to the Prancer broken into, spray-painted and stripped of every possession and all their cash.
In Plano, Texas, they get help from Audrey. Ron Livingston plays Ethan.
Where the Money Went
| Item | Figure |
|---|---|
| Production budget | $31 million |
| Worldwide gross | $107.2 million |
| Critical score | 3.4/10 (Metacritic 34/100) |
| Runtime | 99 minutes |
Those are the numbers the source gives. It does not say whether the film turned a profit, and this paper will not guess.
The Prancer Problem
Daley and Goldstein wrote the script and directed it, and their instinct is to keep piling on. The van has a button for everything. Kevin has a brother to torment in every scene he gets. The sewage reveal is a gag the film treats as a punchline, and it plays as one more stop on a long list. A comedy needs escalation, but escalation without a straight man is just noise, and Helms plays Rusty as a man already defeated before the first mile.
In my reading, Applegate does the most with what she is given in Memphis. Gisondo plays James as a kid who has learned to be small, and that reads as real. The rest is a checklist of set pieces strung between Chicago and Walley World.
The sequel comparison matters here. Vegas Vacation is the film this one follows, and the series has now spent six entries on the same family. This Vacation has a theme park at the end of a long drive and treats the drive as the point. It is not.
What the Cameos Buy
Chase and D’Angelo show up to hand over the keys, and as a piece of storytelling the handoff does not earn its place. That is the problem in miniature: Vacation keeps reaching for the original without understanding what the original had. The earlier films had a man who wanted a perfect trip and a world that refused. This one has a man who wants a perfect trip and a script that agrees with him about how bad everything is.
The Four Corners cops, the trucker, the Ferrari — these are cameos, not characters. Key and Hall as the family friends exist to be gloated at and then vanish.
Vacation is a 99-minute drive with a full tank and no map. It is not offensively bad. It is just inert, and inert is worse.
3.4 of 10.
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