Game Night

Game Night is a surprise entry in the year 2018. With a screwball comical plot about 2 competitive gamer couples going against a supposed antagonist indirectly barring them from having babies, little did we expect the film to be well directed!

The premise was definitely exciting. Jason Bateman as Max and Rachel McAdams as Annie were fun to hang out with! As the pair who can't stand losing, they, especially the latter, acted so well! What would the film have been without Rachel McAdams? Again, a delightful surprise of a performance here! Every interaction between the two will always be game based, be it marriage proposal or charade to kill a sub-villain. This touched the lines of being one-dimensional at times, to be honest.

After a good set-up of characters, with a couple of memorable supporting roles like the creepy cop neighbor Gary (Jesse Plemons) and Max's ever-provoking brother Brooks (Kyle Chandler) who knows how to attack the protagonist's greatest weakness, we were thrown out of the old world into a deadly game night to remember!

Game Night was a feature that's better directed than written. Sure, there were scenes to takeaway with us after the show's over, such as the bullet removal episode where Max bites a rubber burger and Annie wakes her phone constantly using her nose, with both of them resisting the urge to vomit! The other one to store in mind would be the accidental blood drip on the dog where Max attempts to clean it off before matters got worse as the four-legged being wiggled its wet fur, spraying across the cop neighbor's dead wife memorabilia! Both of these were uproariously hilarious sequences!

The other two couples' arguments among each other were funny, particularly the discussion going around about which celebrity the wife slept with, but its function to the story and picture was futile. Many awkward moments appeared because of its pointlessness. Initially, the game managed to sustain interest with clues and different strategies taken to play it. As soon as mobsters and gangs got involved in it, the whole storyline became typical. Gary's participation in solving the crime was touted as commendable work in writing, right before the non-sensical revelation that this were all part of his elaborate plan. We have no idea how did Annie not get sucked into the engine nacelle as the sub-antagonist did. Not to forget, the writers have tried their best to subvert predictability as best as they could, with the slow conveyor belt as an example.

Coming to the direction, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein were really adept in what they were doing! Production company logos falling down as game board pieces, tungsten movie typography, thematically correlating plastic miniature like textures and sizes for the setting, enthrallingly shot egg chase scene, adrenaline-pumping background score, flexible camera navigations and twitches religiously following vehicles on hot pursuit were beyond anticipations for a studio-based light flick like this! Maybe the hand through blinders cheap jump scare could have been avoided, simply because.