Chris Hemsworth exchanges hammer for laughs in Vacation
Family vacations can either be a great time of bonding or a potential recipe for disaster.
For the Grisworlds, it's the latter as the family of four's vacation is filled with misadventures.
Vacation recounts the tale of of patriarch Rusty's (Ed Helms) attempt to bring his family closer together — with a road trip to Walley World, a place which holds fond memories for Rusty, who visited with his family when he was a teenager.
Rusty packs his wife Debbie (Christina Applegate) and warring sons, Kevin (Skyler Gisondo) and James (Steele Stebbins), into a dodgy rental car and heads off to Walley World.
The comedy opens here Aug 6.
Fans of Chris Hemsworth will be in for a treat as they see their golden-maned Thor in his maiden attempt at comedy, where he plays Rusty's brother-in-law Stone, an intimidating, strapping weatherman.
“I don’t have a background in comedy, but everyone on this film couldn’t be more welcoming or more supportive," Hemsworth recounted.
"I was nervous coming into it but they’ve all made it a wonderful experience.”
Vacation is a sequel of sorts to the Chevy Chase-starring National Lampoon films, which first hit the screen in 1983 with the release of John Hughes’s and Harold Ramis’s zeitgeist-shifting National Lampoon’s Vacation, based on Hughes’s short stories in the eponymous humor magazine.
The film became a global phenomenon and opened the way for the Griswolds to bumble through an escalating series of hilarious highs and gut-bustingly funny lows in the three subsequent films that followed—1985’s National Lampoon’s European Vacation, 1989’s National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and 1997’s Vegas Vacation.
Being a diehard fan of the original, Helms relished the opportunity to steer a new generation of Griswolds on their own collision course with destiny.
“When you see the Griswolds fail, time and time again, you get a nice feeling of superiority,” he joked.
“You think, ‘At least I’m not that bad. At least my family’s not that crazy.
"But that’s also why you root for them, and I think, in the end, it feels good when this family gets it together and there’s cohesiveness. It feels gratifying.”
“Hopefully, people will see themselves in these characters,” Helms said.
“It’s the insane situations that the Griswolds wind up in and how they handle it that will make people laugh or cringe or feel empathy.
"It’s just that undying effort to do the right thing, that earnestness and desire to be a loving family against all odds. Yes, there’s a desperation there. Families are a mess, you know?” he added, laughing.
"They’re all a little bit crazy. So when we see one on a movie screen, we want them to get it right, and the Griswolds want to get it right—they just can’t.”
Source: Warner Bros.
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