'Rough Night' Treads Tired Territory

Way back before Friday Night Lights put him on the map as a writer-director, Peter Berg made a deservedly forgotten black comedy called Very Bad Things, about a debauched Vegas bachelor party cut short by the buzzkill of a prostitute getting impaled on a coat hook. Oops. That film at least committed to its sourness, whereas Rough Night, which derails the revelry of a Miami bachelorette weekend by similar means, evinces little conviction of any kind. Mostly, it's a flavorless stew of elements from other, not necessarily better, movies that starts dying around the same time as the unintended victim of the girls gone wild.

That's disappointing given that the movie is directed and co-written by two of the script team on Broad City. It also features Ilana Glazer, the co-creator and star of that sharp and sweet Comedy Central female slacker series, as part of the posse leading astray Scarlett Johansson's straight-arrow bride-to-be, Jess Thayer. But all the talented women here are stuck playing types rather than characters, in a strained frolic in which both the verbal humor and the physical gags too often fall flat.

Read the rest of this review at The Hollywood Reporter.

Scarlett Johansson has recently appeared in Captain America: Civil War and Ghost in the Shell.