Date Night
Fri, April 9, 2010 
Steve Carell and Tina Fey are a major part of one of my favorite hours of TV every week (The Office and 30 Rock, of course), so the idea of both of them teaming up for a romantic comedy action film sounded like a great idea. And for the most part, it was. In Date Night, they were as funny as they are on their respective TV shows without being too over-the-top, and both were completely convincing as a couple whose night on the town takes a series of very unexpected turns.
Phil and Claire Foster are a happily married couple from the New Jersey suburbs who just need a break. Between their busy jobs, their two kids (who leap into their bed wanting breakfast at 5am), and their hectic schedules, they have practically no time to themselves. Even their weekly 'date nights' are usually at the same restaurant with the same meal every time.
So when they learn that two of their friends are getting divorced for mostly the same reason, they decide to shake their date night up a bit. They get dressed up and head into New York for dinner at an expensive and impossible-to-get-into seafood restaurant. When they can't get a table, they decide to throw caution to the wind even further and pretend to be the Tripplehorns, a party-of-two who appeared to be no shows for their reservation.
And that's where it all goes to hell. It turns out the real Tripplehorns have gotten themselves into trouble with the mafia, and before the Fosters have finished dinner, the local goons show up to collect a mysterious flash drive that they don't have. Now a panicked Phil and Claire must spend the rest of the night evading dangerous mobsters and crooked cops so they can track down the actual Tripplehorns (with the help of a perpetually shirtless Mark Wahlberg) find this flash drive, and get home. Normal life suddenly never looked better.
Date Night definitely has shades of Adventures in Babysitting. You've got the normal people from the suburbs up against the dangerous characters of the city having lots of misadventures along the way, and all of the characters you are rooting for learn some valuble lessons along the way. In this case, learning that as a couple you work as a team, no matter how crazy life gets.
The funniest parts of the film are definitely the back-and-forth between Fey and Carell. Their spastic reactions to everything that goes wrong makes you wonder how many times they went off-script and just how many takes it took to finish a scene. (the blooper reel shown during the end credits suggests it took quite a few)
I didn't think the movie as a whole was side-splittingly funny, and it was a bit predictable, but it was very enjoyable and it even had a pretty impressive car chase scene. I definitely recommend it to anyone looking for just a fun night at the movies.
Reader Comments (1)
Just saw this last night. Hilarious! The cameo's were the best part, James Franco, Marky Mark haha...It was good