Date Night

In the book “Rant” Chuck Palahniuk talks about liminoid spaces. These spaces are gaps in regularity that occur when the social norm is flip flopped but accepted. These spaces include holidays like Halloween, Madi Gras, road trips, or date nights….

The author states that these events while normally regarded as being against the social norm, are accepted under their circumstances. Circumstances being scheduled breaks like holidays or stress relief like a vacation, even weekends. They are accepted because it is believed that once over the participants will return to normal behavior, re-energized yes, but also more accepting of the mundane pasterns of life that we seem to fall into. And for Phil (Steve Carell) and Clair Foster (Tina Fey) that is exactly what they would love to do.

“Date Night” is a story of two married people who have become jaded by everyday life, and how they come to appreciate their lives together after a night of one crazy encounter after another. When Phil and Clair learn that their friends are getting divorced, they both look to find ways to break the mundane patterns that they have fallen in and led to the separation of their friends. And they do so by crashing the reservation of another couple at a fancy restaurant in New York City. When a pair of thugs, working for a crime boss, believe that they are the couple who had made the reservation it starts a chain reaction that will lead the Fosters into dangerous and marriage saving situations.

Now while the situations that Phil and Clair get themselves into are funny and entertaining… everything between them is rather dull. The story feels like the writers came up with fun things for the characters to do, and then filled in the blanks till they had a beginning middle and end. The plot was dreary and dull, and in case you missed the point of my first two paragraphs I’ll tell you that the character development in this story is nothing more than a liminoid space.

As far as the acting goes, everyone was great in this! With the exception of Steve Carell and Taraji Henson who plays a police detective. Mark Wahlberg has a small part, which may be the most memorable part of this movie. When watching his scenes I realized that I would be enjoying this movie a lot more if he was plying Phil. And it would probably work well because Phil, despite being a office jockey tax preparer, is kind of bad ass. He steps up to protect his wife, he knocks two guys out cold, and he almost shoots a guy… There is no reason Marky Mark couldn’t kill at this roll.

So with your lead actor kind of doing his same old boring shtick, and the plot being a lazy mess, I really can’t recommend this movie to anyone.