Game Night

There’s a decidedly retro feel to comedy caper Game Night, a sort of Clue meets Adventures In Babysitting with a touch of The Burbs thrown in. Max (Jason Bateman) and Annie (Rachel MacAdams) are a couple of wholesome board game nerds who fall prey to the whims of Max’s shady brother Brooks (Kyle Chandler), a tacky showoff who’s quickly kidnapped in a nonsensical manner that leads all six witnesses to believe the kidnapping is just part of a game. The trivia-focused humor is oddly circular – someone mentions Uma Thurman and then someone else quotes Pulp Fiction; someone mentions Ed Norton and then there’s a Fight Club bit. Otherwise, it’s anarchic enough (and funny enough) that it’s not worth untangling whether the game-within-a-game-but-maybe-not plot makes any sense, though the overly tidy conclusion is a little much.