After the Oscar-nominated, $288m global success of Bridesmaids, it seemed as if the film industry would finally put to rest the tired assumption that female-fronted comedies can’t be just as successful as their male counterparts (in fact, it remains the highest-grossing Judd Apatow-produced film to date). But progress was strangely, frustratingly slow, and despite the darnedest efforts of Bridesmaids director Paul Feig (who went on to make The Heat, Spy and Ghostbusters) and, well, Bad Moms, this particular glass ceiling has remained relatively crack-free.
Instead, it’s on the small screen where women have been granted the opportunity to showcase their comedic talents, from 30 Rock to Veep to The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt to Broad City, the popularity of the latter leading to raucous new comedy Rough Night. The show’s writers Paul W Downs and Lucia Aniello (who also directs) have recruited a doozy of a cast to take on what could be crassly described as a female take on The Hangover (pre-wedding hi-jinks gone horribly wrong) meets Weekend at Bernie’s (a corpse being used as a recurring comedy prop).
Jess (Scarlett Johansson) is getting married, and for her bachelorette party she’s heading to Miami with her old college friends. There’s ex-roommate Alice (Idiotsitter’s Jillian Bell), who’s struggling to get over the past; bickering ex-girlfriends Blair (Zoë Kravitz) and Frankie (Broad City’s Ilana Glazer); and Pippa (Saturday Night Live’s Kate McKinnon), a friend she made while studying in Australia. The stage is set for a weekend of debauchery and after a night of heavy drinking and heavy drugs, Blair decides to order Jess a stripper. But things go south after the stripper accidentally dies and the women find themselves with a body to dispose of.
From early on, it’s clear that we are firmly in coke-snorting, swear-spewing R-rated territory. For so long, comedies about women and aimed at women would be filled with gooey romance and warm affirmation while the men got to partake in more ribald antics. There’s a danger in matching this excess merely to prove a point (Cameron Diaz’s embarrassing attempts to bring equality to the gross-out comedy subgenre, The Sweetest Thing and Bad Teacher, failing to work on any conceivable level) but with nuance and specificity, there’s ample room for women to behave badly too.
Aniello and Downs have already shown with Broad City that they know how to do this well – the show is still one of the funniest around – and, importantly, Rough Night never feels like a simple “women can get drunk as well!” comedy. There’s a non-judgmental tone, as opposed to the conservatism that ultimately killed Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck, and freewheeling banter between the women that feels authentically rooted. But there’s a commercial ambition at play that, while understandable, often feels restrictive. Broad City’s tone, and audience, has always been somewhat niche, the show’s high points often doubling as its strangest. Similarly, the film’s funniest moments are often the smallest, such as throwaway pop culture gags (a jab at Rob Lowe’s past, a brilliantly timed Orange is the New Black critique) or mere reaction shots, but they’re competing against trailer-ready slapstick japes and an awareness of a tipsy Friday night audience seeking big belly-laughs that don’t really come.
The concept is unavoidably dark and, to the film’s credit, the death scene is made suitably distasteful, but it feels like there’s a sharper, funnier, weirder indie that could have been made here, without the framework of a laugh-a-minute studio comedy. The need to pack so many jokes in leads to an infrequent hit rate, and an abruptly pat all-too-happy ending feels like a compromised product of its environment (the similarly themed Very Bad Things was at least allowed to maintain its darkness until the bitter end).
One often underrated element of Broad City is the deeply realized friendship that underpins the comedy, quietly investing us in the characters even as their behavior spirals out of control. Here, the dynamic never quite forms in the way that it needs to and when the film does try to demand our sympathies, it doesn’t feel earned. The cast, though, are uniformly excellent. Johansson, whose talent for comedy has only really been allowed to shine on Saturday Night Live, is a hugely engaging lead, and her dramatic chops allow her to also shine in an effectively nasty third act argument. Bell, usually kept at the sidelines on the big screen, is effortlessly, sometimes riotously on point, handed many of the film’s funnier moments. It’s also refreshing to finally see a film that knows what to do with the uniquely odd comic skills of McKinnon, and even if her main character trait is that she’s Australian, she never fails to liven up a scene.
There’s an unusually progressive dynamic brewing between the characters played by Kravitz and Glazer – essentially playing a variation on her Broad City role – who dated at college and have a frisson throughout. Unlike other recent mainstream films that have acted coyly around same-sex relationships, there’s a casualness here that’s worth praising. The men in the film are rightly secondary, and this is used for a few smartly subversive gags about how sedate the bachelor party is in comparison.
Rough Night is a great deal funnier than the majority of studio comedies released in the past year (admittedly the bar is low), but it feels hampered by its canvas. The pop-soundtracked gloss is at odds with an amoral premise and a script that only truly comes to life when it opts for amusing the few rather than causing a broad crowd to guffaw. A fun night will be had, but you’ll have trouble remembering it in the morning.
