Vacation Friends 2 Parent Guide

Soon after their respective weddings, Marcus (Lil Rel Howery) and Emily (Yvonne Orji) invite party animals Ron (John Cena) and Kyla (Meredith Hagner) on an all-expenses-paid trip to a luxury resort in the Caribbean. Marcus is trying to arrange a business deal with the owners of the resort, so he needs to keep his friends under control. But when Kyla’s father, Reese (Steve Buscemi) shows up, fresh out of jail, he throws Marcus’s plans into chaos.

I thought that the original Vacation Friendswas a semi-decent comedy, if you could overlook the huge amounts of negative content. It made me laugh and it had some heart to it. Unfortunately, the sequel decided to keep the objectionable content but forgot to add in the humor and heart. This film was an absolute slog to get through. It wasn’t funny and didn’t have anything interesting to say. I don’t care about any of these characters, who seem to have lost some of the redeeming qualities they started out with and simply spend their time screaming. Yelling isn’t a joke; it’s just loud.

It really is a shame that the script let these actors down so badly, because they were great in the original, and this installment adds Steve Buscemi and Ronnie Chieng to the mix which is always a good idea. I just wish they were given more to do, especially Yvonne Orji as Emily, who the writers seem to have forgotten about for a majority of the runtime, leaving her standing around not doing much of anything.

If I’m spending my movie-watching time not laughing and regularly checking the runtime, the film is no longer a comedy; it’s a chore. And on top of the lack of substance or humor there are mounds of negative content. I counted over 100 F-bombs and I’m not terribly certain that I caught them all. There’s also a lot of substance use, in some scenes to obvious excess, and a smattering of violence thrown in. For the original I suggested that people who weren’t fussed by negative content would enjoy the film, but for the sequel I can’t even say that. After that slog I feel like I need a vacation!