Tossed into the stream during the second summer of Covid, Vacation Friends was a throwback to the kind of big, bright studio comedy that doesn’t get made as much any more. It wasn’t anywhere near as entertaining as it should or could have been (think more Couples Retreat than Forgetting Sarah Marshall) but it was a hit for Hulu, scoring a record-breaking opening weekend, and showing that while audiences still might be reticent to rush out to one of these movies on the big screen (the summer has proved to be another rough one for theatrically released comedies), a low-stakes home-watch is an easier yes.
While Vacation Friends 2 might then make commercial sense, it’s not something that carries any creative reasoning to it, comedy sequels historically struggling to find ways to justify their own existence, repetition trumping reinvention. The bar was low after the first, a half-assed waste of actors who deserve better, but the sequel is somehow even worse, a maddeningly unfunny string of bad decisions, the worst of which was deciding to make it in the first place.
