Far from perfect, Rough Night is a lot of fun

CAN one movie be the ultimate decider in whether women can successfully anchor a big comedy? Of course not. With that in mind, we give you Rough Night.

ROUGH Night opens on a flashback. It’s 2006 and Jess, Alice, Frankie and Blair are at a college Halloween party, on the verge of being the first women to ever win the annual beer pong tournament.

In a throwaway line, one character says that the fate of the entire sisterhood doesn’t rest on their victory.

The same rings true for female-centric raunchy comedies — they don’t all have to prove “women are funny,” as if that was still up for debate. No one movie should be the all-time arbiter of whether women can anchor a big release comedy.

Hailed as some kind of female version of The Hangover, it’s more like The Hangover 1.5 — not as tight as the first but infinitely more redeemable than any of the sequels. It’s also butting up against the bar set by other female ensemble comedies like Bridesmaids or, to a lesser degree, Bachelorette and Pitch Perfect.

So with those expectations in mind, Rough Night does what it should — it offers an enjoyable, diverting 100 minutes, with plenty of opportunities for giggles and guffaws thanks to some cracking lines delivered with confidence by, in particular, Ilana Glazer (Broad City) and Kate McKinnon (Ghostbusters, Saturday Night Live).

But it also sticks closely to the formula and there are few surprises.

When girls go wild.

Jess (Scarlett Johansson in the straight woman role) is a political aspirant running for state senate and has her phone glued to her hand. She’s also getting married so her needy college bestie Alice (Jillian Bell) has planned an epic hen’s weekend in Miami.

Joining them are Frankie (Glazer) and Blair (Zoe Kravitz), who used to be a couple and whose bickering provides good comedic fodder. And then there’s Pippa (McKinnon with a shocking Aussie accent), Jess’ friend from Australia who travels with her own jar of Vegemite and admits that while singer-songwriter is the dream, party clown is the reality.

As expected, the plan for a legendary 55-hour bender starts to go awry as soon as one of them accidentally kills the stripper they hired for hijinks, as you do. Unable to call the cops — they’ve all had mountains of cocaine — the group tries, vainly, to deal with the dead stripper while navigating their swinging neighbours (Demi Moore and Ty Burrell) and the 653 other obstacles in their way.

Pizza is the food of choice when someone accidentally dies on your watch.

Co-written by Lucio Aniello and Paul W. Downs and directed by Aniello, there was a reasonable expectation that Rough Night would carry over some of the same quirky energy from their cult show, Broad City. But Rough Night is a much broader comedy designed for a mainstream audience so it doesn’t have the same sharp edge.

Much of it is contrived and overstuffed — there was no need for a well-trodden friendship conflict when there was already so much going on — and it is at times ramshackle.

It also makes the mistake of explaining its jokes which undercuts its own authority by pointing out the obvious and suggesting its audience wouldn’t have gotten there on its own. It’s this kind of balance the film often manages to miss.

But when it’s good, it’s hilarious — like when someone pops a bottle of champagne at the airport or the gender reversal subplot involving Jess’ fiance and his lame friends at their buck’s weekend where the wildest thing they could imagine was drinking a chilled Lambrusco.

So, yeah, Rough Night didn’t rewrite the book and it’s often thoroughly silly. But it’s also — like hen’s nights are supposed to be but never are — a lot of fun.

Rating: 3/5

Rough Night is in cinemas from today.

Continue the conversation on Twitter with @wenleima.

Because we all end up accidentally killing a stripper, right?

Originally published as Far from perfect, Rough Night is a lot of fun