“Game Night’s title alone reminds one of the movie Date Night. It has a similar plot and set up. Married couple, misunderstanding, people trying to kill them, jokes about the situation. Date Night was an enjoyable and more importantly re-watchable film. So does Game Night reach the same conclusion? No… No it does not.”

What a letdown. I guess, looking back, the trailer wasn’t that great. I don’t know why I was looking forward to the film. But very quickly into the viewing, I realised that this was a turkey. For a film with a very simple premise, why was it 45 minutes into the film before I felt like the story had really started? And for a comedy, at what point was the film trying to be funny? I didn’t even snicker until over an hour into the film, and it ain’t that long a movie!

The cast isn’t particularly good. Rachel McAdams appears to be trying really hard but knows that the material isn’t good and has a look of embarrassment on her face at times. I’m a big fan of McAdams, particularly liking her in Morning Glory and The Time Travellers Wife. But here, she really comes off badly in many scenes, although she was still the best member of the cast in the movie.

Jason Bateman often comes off as bland to me and this film is especially so. Where McAdams throws everything at her lines, Bateman underplays many of them. He’s not charismatic enough for the role and despite a few amusing quips between himself and McAdams, there is no chemistry at all between them.

Kyle Chandler is another actor who always feels bland and more suited to 4th tier roles alongside much more high calibre actors.

The rest of the cast are fairly generic actors who could be easily replaced by anyone and you wouldn’t notice. Lamorne Morris seems to have been cast just because he can do a reasonable Denzel Washington impression, and it allowed them to have a running joke about Denzel, but all that did was make me think of Denzel and what a better movie this would have been if Denzel had been there. The Equalizer 2 comes out this year, there’s one to look forward to!

The musical score is very odd and does not set the tone for the film at all. There was a metaphor for Pacman being used in the plot, so my wife suggested the score was trying to sound like Pacman, but if that was the reason for it, it certainly didn’t work.

The last act is a ridiculous series of twists that do not work at all. The film falls over itself to the very last frame, and then proceeds to bore you with a slow moving credit sequence that I think was trying to show how clever the whole thing was…. Except it wasn’t.

This will certainly rank somewhere on the worst movies list for 2018. The strong start to the cinematic year has been hit a second blow.