The Great Outdoors

 Year:  1988

Director:  Howard Deutch

Screenplay:  John Hughes

Starring:  Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Stephanie Faracy, Annette Bening

Running Time:  90 minutes

Genre:  Comedy

Chicago resident Chester "Chet" Ripley (Candy), his wife Connie (Faracy) and their two sons are spending their summer at a bucolic lake resort.  However, their holiday takes a turn for the worse when Connie's sister Kate Craig (Bening) arrives uninvited with her obnoxious investment broker husband Roman (Aykroyd) and their twin daughters.  Soon a peaceful lakeside vacation turns into a catalogue of misadventures and disasters.

This is a moderately funny family comedy.  John Candy plays the gentle Chicagoan who just wants a peaceful holiday for some family bonding and Dan Aykroyd is well-cast as his annoying yuppie brother in law.  Stephanie Faracy and Annette Bening, in her film debut, really don't have much to do as the supportive wives and mothers.  Scripted by John Hughes, who became something of a celebrity in the 1980s, with scripts including National Lampoon's Vacation (1983), Pretty in Pink (1986) and Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), as well as writing and directing The Breakfast Club (1985), Weird Science (1985), Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) and the John Candy starring Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987).  The film feels like a watered-down Vacation film with the same episodic structure moving from comic set-piece to comic set-piece, before a heart-warming conclusion.  None of the cast has anything to stretch themselves, and there are moments where the film looks surprisingly cheap, like a scene where they are fishing at dawn and the lake is very clearly a stage set.  However there are some very funny and memorable scenes, such as Candy's disastrous trip on water skis, and a scene where Roman persuades Chet to take the "Old 96" challenge in a local restaurant and eat a 96 pound steak.  From Candy's reaction when the crazed-looking chef in a blood stained apron sets down the huge slab of meat in front of him and his mute pleading and suffering as he is forced to finish this mass of food, is a wonderful piece of silent comic acting.  By the way, there is a restaurant in California that does serve an "Old 96" in tribute to this movie.  It's recommended for between four to six people.  One of the funniest things in the film are the racoons that periodically try and get inside the tourist's rubbish bins, and talk in their own chittering language, which is subtitled.  The romantic sub-plot between Chet's teenage son Buck (Chris Young) and local girl Cammie (Lucy Deakins) is done well and is actually quite moving, but there is not enough of it for it not to feel like it was just shoe-horned in at the last minute.  Director Howard Deutch, who previously worked with Hughes on Pretty in Pink, does a serviceable job.  It's not a great film, but it is  enjoyable enough, and there are enough laughs to make it an entertaining diversion.

John Candy and Dan Aykroyd in The Great Outdoors
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