If there’s one sentiment I never thought I’d express again about a Hollywood comedy, it’s “that movie wasn’t long enough.” Amy Schumer plays Emily, an underachieving slacker who’s dumped by her boyfriend shortly before a planned vacation to Ecuador, and who convinces her mom, Linda (Goldie Hawn), to come along instead; shenanigans ensue when the pair are kidnapped and held for ransom. Schumer’s in her wheelhouse as a self-absorbed mess, and she’s challenged for movie MVP status by Ike Barinholtz as her coddled brother. But it’s also a movie that wastes both the return to the screen of Hawn (whose character is built on historical photos of her irrepressible grin) and Joan Cusack (sure, cast her and then make her mute). More significantly, the jokes are often blunted by pacing that seems to have excised huge chunks of both necessary exposition and just plain funny situations. There’s no excuse for the material that is amusing here not to build to bigger laughs, except that almost nothing gets a chance to build at all. Somewhere, there’s a middle ground between a comedy unwilling to cut any punch line, and one that doesn’t know how to set one up.
By
Scott Renshaw