FILM REVIEW: “Vacation Friends” is long on screen time but short on jokes

Lil Rel Howery always seems to play two roles in one.

One, the clueless clown who wouldn’t be able to tell which way an elevator was going if he had two guesses!

Two, he plays the edgy guy who is giving of his lively spirit through performances of the best friend variety.

He played this role to a tittle in the movie “Get Out”, so one would be shocked to see him playing the straight man.

To be clear, in the buddy comedy genre, a straight man is a stock character who serves as comedic foil in a double comedy act.

This character is usually a friend or partner to a wild associate.

The straight man is expected to maintain complete composure while his partner behaves in the exact opposite way.

Such straight men always have a fund of deadpan lines as Dan Aykroyd did alongside Tom Hanks in the 1987 movie “Dragnet”.

Or like Sylvester Stallone did when paired with Kurt Russell in the 1989 American buddy cop action comedy “Tango & Cash”.

Not only does this more serious and sober-headed incarnation not suit Howery, it is made worse because he plays the straight man to John Cena in this movie.

And Cena is not very funny. Okay, to the story then.

Howery and Yvonne Orji co-star as Marcus and Emily, a couple who travel to a Mexican resort for what Emily assumed was a vacation; until Marcus suddenly pops the question.

He bungles his proposal, of course.

And this is not helped by the resort’s concierge Maurillo (Carlos Santos) who hilariously takes all the surprise out of Marcus’s proposal by dropping more clues than the hyphens dropped in multiple merry-go-rounds that are no longer merry.

So when Marcus and Emily cross paths with Ron (John Cena) and Kyla (Meredith Hagner, a dead ringer for actress Kate Hudson), expect endless episodes of crazy punctuated by Marcus’s comical sense of outrage and Emily’s rather muted slay-queening.

A feat Orji perfected in the movie “Night School”, a Kevin Hart and Tiffany Haddish vehicle whose wheels came off at the movie’s opening credits.

In the spirit of Mark Twain’s “I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them”, the four characters grow to be the kind of bosom buddies that require a shared boob job.

Ron and Kyla introduce Marcus and Emily to a world of debauchery in which they drink their body weights and get high on more “snow” than Christmas.

When they all leave Mexico, they all link up seven months later and this is where “Vacation Friends” devolves into a comedy of errors which are about as subtle as Mr. Bean’s dancing eyebrows.

There are lessons here about loving oneself, warts and all, while using this same love to sculpt loyalty out of your friend’s feet of clay.

Incidentally, such lessons are tempered by the usual break up and make up staple of romantic comedies.

So expect friendship and betrayal to shape the different types of relationships in these relationships to show what true friendship should represent in any kind of relationship.

Sometimes you need a reminder that there are people like Ron in the world: a diamond in the rough that first comes across as the personification of dumb and dumber made dumberer.

But, ever so shockingly, his character develops into this big, sweet, charming, and refreshing example of a true friend.

Cena and Howery work well together, but I feel their different personas could’ve benefited from a role reversal with Cena playing the straight man.

Orji is her understated sexy self and so the feminine comedic momentum must be carried by Hagner, who doesn’t disappoint despite the script’s unfunny lines and uninspired set pieces.