Game Night/Every Day, Short Cut Review

This weekend, its world’s most dangerous game versus your love interest switching bodies every day. Let’s check these to out and see which ones are right for you!

Game Night (Directed By John Francis Daley & Johnathon M. Goldstein)

Max & Annie (played by Jason Bateman & Rachel McAdams) are self-absorbed competitive gamers. Their entire romantic relationship was connected from playing all sorts of competitive games together. They’ll have game nights with their friends, Ryan, Sarah, Kevin, and Michelle (played Sharon Horgan, Larnone Morris, Kylie Bunbury), where they would catch up on life while competing in various challenges.

One night, Max’s brother Brooks (played by Kyle Chandler) challenges them to a murder mystery game at his house. The winner gets to drive his expensive vehicle, but no one realizes that the mystery might be a real case to solve…or is it. The movie does an amazing job playing with your expectations and throwing you off. I literally did not se most of these twists coming and it’s backed by mostly hilarious dialogue.

These players are so bent on victory that they could give less cruds on figuring out if this crime investigation game is real or not, just so their team can win a pricey car. When aware of the reality, they act completely unprofessional about it.

I have not seen a dark comedy like this done to a surprisingly great extent. I’m not a fan of raunchy R-Rated humor for the sake of it and was pleasantly surprised to see this film not abuse the f-bomb or talk about having sex all the time.

That’s not to say you won’t hear strong language or sex jokes at all, I’ve just been burned out by these R-Rated movies trying to be funny by relying so much on the two. Plus, there’s also a shocking depth in character development. I had no idea this movie would contain so much personality in an hour and a half movie length about R-Rated dark comedy.

I especially love the tense action scenes done completely with practical stunt work. One of my favorites is a chase scene that’s one continuous shot where these players are running for their lives from real threats.

If I have anything bad to say, it’s that this movie also loves to do celebrity or movie reference jokes, another type of humor abused in comedies. These are the jokes that after one board game match where they are needed, aren’t humorous at all.

There’s one point where they stop to home in on a celebrity punch-line that isn’t clever by any means. Luckily, they know how to follow the bad joke up with a solid one or a scenario that keeps you on the edge of your seat. The climax might also be a little ridiculous, but not enough to bug me or take way from the brilliance of this movie.

Game Night was way better than it had any right to be and knowing that this director’s next project is an adaptation of Flash gives me a little more hope in DC’s future! Unfortunately, the celebrity jokes do happen often to where I can’t give this the highest recommendation, but it’s clawing at the edges of a “best of 2018” movie. Go see it!

Every Day (Directed By Michael Sucsy)

Now if you want an unintentional comedy, Every Day has your back! Based on a best-selling novel, the films stars Angourie Rice as Rhiannon. This 16-year-old teen had an obsessive crush on Justin (played by Justice Smith) until one day, he gets possessed by a spirit named “A”, temporarily turning Justin from a stoner black teen stereotype to a dude who can’t act…I mean the most romantic individual she’s ever seen.

After so many different teenagers keep falling in-love with her every day, knowing about her events the previous day, she finds out about the spirit. From there, it’s an enchanting love tale of Rhiannon dating so many bodies in one week, just for that romantic spirit possessing them during the day. The spirit “A” cannot stay in one body for more than a day, switching things up constantly.

I’m not going to hide anything. This is a really bad movie coming out during the wrong period of society. I just mentioned the black teen who smokes, plays Grand Turismo Sport on his PS4 and doesn’t do anything ambitiously romantic, which means he is a terrible person…who works at Cinemark for his day job.

Black Panther just came out, and some of us are still viewing black people as one thing. He even talks in typical hood slang. Besides Justin, you have your main girl ignoring education, relationships and even her family to be with a ghost. There are so many messed up things this movie slides passed too. Once a body is no longer possessed, the person who’s been possessed might deal with mental anxiety if they recall being possessed.

On top of this, some of these people “A” takes control of are left knowing they’ve been kidnapped by this strange teen wanting to make out with them and parents who are horrifically worried for them. Then it leads me to the back story of “A”, where “A” grew up, possessing different bodies every day, while aging with the subjects it’s controlling…can ghosts actually die like humans in this story?

Nothing makes sense of course. If anything, I’d compare this movie to something like A Christmas Prince, where it’s so generic, yet creatively dumb, you are soaked into the stupidity of it all. For a gimmicky love story, there’s so much product placement.

The spirit uses Intagram to keep track of the bodies it possessed, also hanging out with it’s victims in a “possessed body subreddit”, despite repeatedly telling Rhiannon that no one knows of “A” even after mentioning subreddit. I mentioned PlayStation and Cinemark, but the ads just keep on rolling. This movie ends how all bad love stories end, except this one made the whole journey seem pointless.

I would recommend as a movie to laugh at with friends, but then you bring in kids from Spider-Man Homecoming & Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle, which throws this down harder than other fun bad movies I’ve seen this year, if not already for the awful timing. You might as well forget about this one and go about your Every Day life…