Game Night

It was love at first answer - there's no other way to describe the relationship between Max (Jason Bateman) and Annie (Rachel McAdams), who are both crazy about board games. Since their first encounter during a trivia night at a bar, the two have been inseparable - in love as well as in play. They regularly host entertaining game nights with their friends Kevin (Lamorne Morris) and Michelle (Kylie Bunbury), as well as Ryan (Billy Magnussen) and his changing companions, where the hosts always come out on top, of course. But when Brooks (Kyle Chandler), Max's brother, invites the troupe to a very special game in which the friends are to work in teams to solve a kidnapping, they have no idea that they're up against real gangsters and that the fun they're having could actually end up being life-threatening.

After the overly crude trip with the new Griswold generation in Vacation, directing duo John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein take it down a notch in terms of fecal humor with Game Night - which results in the entertainment value skyrocketing significantly. Sure, even in this rather conventional comedy not every gag is right and sometimes the humor overshoots the mark in a very brute way. But on the whole Daley and Goldstein have staged a very fast-paced and above all funny game night, which lives from the good interaction of the ensemble as well as from the twisty story.

The initial situation is not new. Bill Murray, for example, in Agent Zero Zero Nix 21 years ago, believed he was part of the game, although he was being hunted by real gangsters and secret services. But even though the idea has already been used in other movies, Daley and Goldstein manage very well to wring a few surprising sides out of the whole thing in the end. The biggest surprise might be Jesse Plemons, who delivers a delightfully weird performance as a very strange cop and neighbor of Max and Annie, which - in contrast to the rest of the movie - stays in your memory for a long time.

Game Night is no masterpiece, nor does it add anything new to the comedy genre. But the film succeeds wonderfully in providing its target audience with 100 minutes of light entertainment with plenty of good laughs. If you like US comedies of the not so subtle kind, just want to switch off and have a lot of fun, you should definitely get a ticket for this game night. For this there is clearly one: Absolutely worth seeing!

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp