Vacation Friends premieres on Hulu on Friday, Aug. 27.
Vacation Friends, starring Lil Rel Howery and John Cena, may not reach the absolute heights of comedy, but it's still an enjoyable hang featuring fun chemistry and another standout performance by Cena (in what's become a summer bubbling over with good ol' John).
When headlining wrestlers transition over to movies, the first instinct is usually to start them out as a straightforward action star. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson traveled this path, with films like The Scorpion King, The Rundown, and Walking Tall, and while he was fine in those films, Johnson was able to separate from the pack because of SNL and Be Cool.
Similarly, Cena began with stunted actioners like The Marine and 12 Rounds, but it was Trainwreck and Blockers that helped him ascend. It took someone being able to see beyond a dude seemingly sculpted out of stone to give him a chance to show off his true charisma. The same can even be said of Dave Bautista and his MCU Drax role. The actual comedy, and improv, talents of top-level wrestlers cannot be understated.
So, naturally, Cena is pure joy here, as he's able to use his wit and charm to their fullest while also borrowing another key ingredient from wrestling: finding the right dance partner. Like Johnson, who was lighting up the screen this summer with Emily Blunt in Jungle Cruise, Cena is able to make magic with fresh and formidable scene partners. Both Howery and Insecure's Yvonne Orji are great here as the "reactors" to Cena and co-star Meredith Hagner's wild antics. Howery and Orji's Marcus and Emily aren't fully free, but also not firmly rigid, so they're able to take a few beats to absorb the craziness while still having a blast partaking in it.
Vacation Friends isn't mean-spirited. At first glance, it may seen like Cena and Hagner's Ron and Kyla are destructively chaotic, like something out of a Hangover movie. It's all a little warmer than that. This is not a "one guy annoys another guy for 90 minutes"-style comedy, though the ads may steer you into thinking that. Marcus and Emily genuinely like Ron and Kyla, and during their week in Mexico, the two couples have a good-natured (and only slightly debaucherous) time. It actually makes the petty and predictable blowup near the end of the movie feel a bit too forced, since this foursome only ever benefits from being friends. That third act conflict aside, the medium levels of shock here help the movie feel less aggravating overall and more enjoyable.
Much of the tension and conflict in Vacation Friends is fairly easy to map out ahead of time. It's basically all misunderstandings which we're way ahead of, and while that stifles the story a teensy bit, it doesn't fully squash the fun. After Marcus and Emily have their raucous romp with Ron and Emily, who are wackily cordial and earnest (especially with drugs and sex), they go back to their old non-vacation lives until their wedding day arrives seven months later. Ron and Kyla unexpectedly show up, never realizing that they'd gotten the brush-off, and the stuffy affair (lorded over by Emily's disapproving father, played by Robert Wisdom) livens up.
The only times Vacation Friends doesn't really work is when it strains to make Marcus and Emily actually angry with Ron and Kyla, because, aside from a few instances, they're actually incredible people who are liked by almost everyone. They just commit the sin (for the sake of comedy) of speaking freely in front of the repressed and uptight. Another bright spot here is Hagner, who you may have seen in Search Party or Palm Springs, as Cena's zany partner in crime. These two obviously need Marcus and Emily to bounce their nuttiness off of, but they also need each other as perfectly synced-up social pterodactyls always willing to live every moment in life to the Nth degree.