National Lampoon's European Vacation

Too many scenes in European Vacation peter out about a gag or two short for the film to be as funny as it ought to be. But the basic amiability of the humor is as pleasant as it is surprising.

The London scenes are enjoyable – the ‘look kids... Big Ben... Parliament’ roundabout routine should be a staple of every family trip to the capital – but overall, it’s not quite funny or memorable enough.

While it's very much a retread, it succeeds in following up the first film's humor with more in a similar vein.

Chase and D'Angelo are clever and naturally funny, and they're well-matched. And yet the movie is dumb, so dumb it must have taken some work to make it that way. Perhaps next the Griswalds should make a forced march through a Hollywood executive's brain. [27 July 1985, p.B3]

Story [by John Hughes] of a frenetic, chaotic tour of the Old World, with Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo reprising their roles as determined vacationers, is graceless and only intermittently lit up by lunacy and satire.

There was bite and outrageousness and a touch of the surreal to the excesses of National Lampoon's Vacation (in which Chevy Chase and Harold Ramis humanized Hughes' cartoonlike material). This was writing whose springboard might have been awful firsthand experience. European Vacation feels as though it were dreamed up to cover the rent on the beach house for the summer.

Heckerling directs this mess with no sense of pace and less sense of where to put the camera. There are pixilated, MTV-style sequences that simply slow up the story, car chases and car crashes, and, of course, aerobicizers boinging out of their leotards. The best thing in the movie is the catchy theme from the last Vacation, which, unfortunately, hasn't the slightest thing to do with Europe.

This one has moments, but a lot of the magic that oozed from the original has gone missing. I chalk that up to an increase in slapstick and zany situations, plus an almost total withdrawal from the quieter character moments that grounded the family's first vacation. While the first Vacation definitely has its silly tendencies, it also knows when to tighten the reins and slow down a bit. The European chapter, on the other hand, is content to keep plowing straight ahead, often leaping well beyond the limits of belief. There are definitely some rich laughs to be had, particularly when Clark participates in a traditional Octoberfest dance or a French waiter speaks his mind via subtitle, but my favorite bits always involve the family's personalities ricocheting off of each other and, this time, that takes a clear back seat to the cheap puns and campy sight gags.