Review: Date Night

Steve Carell and Tina Fey pair up for their first big screen comedy. They play Phil and Claire Foster, a middle aged couple who are afraid that their marriage has lost its spark. To rediscover the old magic, they leave the kids with a babysitter and head off to a hip restaurant in Manhattan for dinner - but they can’t get a table, so they impulsively claim someone else’s reservation. This is a bad idea: turns out the couple they are impersonating is shaking down a corrupt district attorney, and Claire and Phil end up spending their romantic evening running around Manhattan, desperately trying to evade a couple of gun toting thugs.

The premise is good, but boy, is the script mediocre. It bounces from thriller to screwball comedy and back again, and then tries to mix the two, but it never goes far enough in any direction to be really funny or suspenseful. And the screenwriter tries to address the whole monotonous marriage thing by arbitrarily tacking on the occasional relationship discussion – Phil and Claire actually pull their getaway car over so they can “talk,” when they should be driving for their lives. There are also some weird character shifts: in the beginning, both Phil and Claire seem like interesting, smart, slightly wacky people whose spontaneous selves have gotten lost in the routines of day to day family life. But by the end of the movie, we are asked to believe that Phil is a crafty latent super spy, and Claire is unable to follow a simple line of reasoning. “I don’t know what’s going on,” she keeps moaning, and we wonder how that is possible, because there isn’t much happening at all.

All that being said, this isn’t a terrible movie, just kind of a disappointing one. It could easily wait for video but if you are looking for a night out, Date Night is good for some laughs and anyway, it’s fun to watch Tina Fey and Steve Carell work. B-


Photo - Twentieth Century Fox