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Canberra Today 15°/16° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review / ‘Rough Night’ (MA) half a star

THIS is writer/director Lucia Aniello’s first feature after a relatively short career in series TV and short films.

And her lack of professionalism as its writer sticks out like the proverbial!

What it’s about is four young women who, a decade after finishing college, go to Miami for a weekend of debauchery before Jess (Scarlett Johansson, whose filmography includes several films worth admiring) gets elected to the State Legislature and marries Peter (Paul Downs, who also has a writing credit).

Organising the gig is bigly-built teacher Alice (Jillian Bell) who’s bringing a bag of phallic-shaped dildos (that never get used). Zoë Kravitz and Ilana Glazer complete the quartet. Jess has invited an Australian friend Pippa (an abominably awful caricature of an Australian from Kate McKinnon).

After drinking too much and snorting a lot of coke, they hire a stripper to come to their rented house. The guy who arrives gets killed when Alice accidentally knocks him into the corner of a cupboard.

To that point, the film is zany, improbable and implausible. How the women deal with the new dilemma is something else. Think incredible, stupid, foolish, indeed just about any synonym for those words in whatever is your favourite thesaurus.

Rough night? Rough movie says it better. I can’t fathom just what audience cohort it was intended to please or what stylistic genre it was intended to reflect. About as funny as the deceased arriving late at the funeral, its glorification of bad taste may be forgivable but its shoddy production values are not.

At all cinemas

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Ian Meikle, editor

Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

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