Rough Night       1 ½ stars

Rough Night is an uneven 2017 comedy about a group of girl friends from college who get together for a wild bachelorette party when one of their group is about to get married. It stars Scarlett Johansson as Jess who is the one getting married to Peter (Paul Downs who I never heard of before) and happens to be running for a state office. It’s an unusual comedy role for Johansson who is often found in drama and action roles (The Avengers). Alice (Jillian Bell) is her funny best friend and roommate from college who sets up the wild weekend in Miami, Florida. Her two other friends are Blair (Zoe Kravitz) and Frankie (Ilana Glazer). Then Pippa from Australia (Kate McKinnon) arrives who is Jess’ friend from Australia. McKinnon provides a lot of comedy to the movie being quite an accomplished improv actor, but the Australian accent is not convincing. The group arrives at a million dollar mansion on the beach (where most of the scenes are) and before long they manage to accidentally kill the male stripper that Frankie has hired for the party. The rest of the movie is made up of the hijinks that ensues as the women struggle to come up with a plan that will keep them out of prison and save Jess from a career ending scandal. Since that isn’t enough to carry the movie, another comedy bit is added involving Paul’s misguided efforts to drive to Miami to save their relationship. (Somehow in one of the most contrived aspects of the movie it becomes necessary for him to travel wearing diapers and no pants!) The movie feels like it has borrowed material from other comedies involving bachelor/bachelorette parties and has little originality. And since it is a bachelorette comedy there is no shortage of sex related scenes and jokes throughout, especially with Jillian Bell’s Alice who seems obsessed with penis jokes. The movie was made mainly by Lucia Aniello who has few credits to her name. I would advise Scarlett Johansson to find better comedy material in the future and that goes for the rest of the cast as well.