Long Night's Journey Into Date

Note: This review originally appeared at www.theboomermagazine.com

Watching “Date Night” is not dissimilar to being a relatively proficient prospector. You have to sift through a lot of silt, but you find more than a few nuggets of gold.

Of course, with Tina Fey and Steve Carell, you might reasonably be expecting a mother lode. Of all the people in America who learned their craft at The Second City in Chicago and have back-to-back sitcoms Thursday nights on NBC, Fey and Carell are currently two of the funniest.

So it isn’t a surprise that “Date Night” is funny. But it is a little surprising that it isn’t funnier.

Fey and Carell play the Fosters, a couple with kids in the suburbs whose marriage is mired in the mud. They decide to break the routine by going to a tragically chic restaurant where, faced with the prospect of never getting a table, they claim to be another couple who didn’t show for their reservations. A couple of bad guys who apparently haven’t seen “North By Northwest” assume the Fosters are the other couple, shake them down for a MacGuffin and chase them through the streets of New York. Meanwhile, the Fosters have to prove they are who they say they are, find out the identity of the bad guys and bring everyone to justice.

There’s a whole lot of Hitchcock going on here, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does tend to make the story seem formulaic. That puts the movie’s ultimate success or failure in the hands of the writer (uneven), the director (uneven) and the stars (less even than you might expect).

For a movie with such masters of verbal wit, many of the better jokes are visual. A scene with a sputtering motorboat is a highlight, Fey’s removing her mouth guard is hilariously unsexy (although she looks good in her U.Va. T-shirt) and a running gag about unclosed cabinets sort of works, too.

But writer Josh Klausner doesn’t know when to stop. Too often, he looks for the easiest gag — usually just the name of an intimate body part spoken for no particular reason. And the movie’s big strip-club set piece only makes us cringe in embarrassment; instead of being funny, it just comes across as a cheap and sleazy way to show Fey in a bustier, fishnet stockings and a strip pole.

Director Shawn Levy does little here to improve on his record of mediocrity (including both “Night at the Museum” movies), so the large number of cameos must be due to the attractive wattage of the stars. It’s a good thing, too, because some of the cameos are among the film’s best moments. James Franco and Mila Kunis are particularly fun as the couple who made the original reservations, Mark Wahlberg is humorous but overused as a beefcake deus ex machina and William Fichtner makes the most out of his small part as a D.A.

As is often the case, the ending is solid and provides more of a sense of having been entertained than the rest of the movie warrants. But don’t worry. There are plenty of flakes of gold to be found.