Date Night

Impressions before seeing it
Normally I'd probably ignore this movie, but it stars Steve Carell and Tina Fey, two of my favourite sitcom stars, as a married couple. Sounds awesome!

How was it?
If anything else, I think Date Night is a "star vehicle". Aside from Carell and Fey, there are plenty of other familiar faces, and rather than enhance the film like they're supposed to, they are the film. The script isn't really that interesting, and there is a scene on a subway where Phil (Carell) explains to a disoriented Claire (Fey) what is going on and what they've gotten themselves into, even though it's already been established and is really not that complicated, insulting both Claire's intelligence and the audience's. Minus more points from the script.

There are some decent laughs here and there, but nothing that is downright hilarious. Again, I blame the script because Carell and Fey themselves are much funnier than the source material, and most of the funniest parts were probably improvised by them anyway, or at least were made funny by their comedic talents. A lot of precious comedy time is instead wasted on action sequences or dramatic/emotional scenes about the couple's relationship, none of which was really gripping to me. I feel like the writers were also trying to present the illusion of screenwriting genius by duplicating certain occurrences and lines so that it would look like the couple's everyday life had almost prepared them for this action-packed night, but again I saw right through it. And I am disappointed that the "bumping into a glass door" gag was included. That one is getting really old, guys, can we please stop putting it in movies? It's about as unfunny and overused as "Say hello to my little friend!", which luckily nobody said in this movie.

Recommendation
Clearly I was disappointed, but I still have trouble hating this movie because I just love the idea of Steve Carell and Tina Fey in the same film. They both write, I think Date Night could have been a fantastic movie if they had teamed up to pen the script. But alas, they did not, and so Date Night is mostly forgettable except that it stars two sitcom superstars. Excuse me while I stare longingly at the poster and imagine a better movie.