Date Night: A good watch for married people

Phil and Claire Foster are your typical married couple with jobs, kids and a number of other responsibilities and problems which have made their lives somewhat stale, especially in the romance department. To rekindle the romance, they head to the big city for a date night, but when they take the reservations of the Tripplehorns at a fancy restaurant, their evening takes an interesting turn.

Steve Carell and Tina Fey made for a terrific on screen couple and each was able to bring their own unique comedic style to the table against the backdrop of some truly outlandish situations and circumstances. Carell delivered the laughs with his dry style while Fey was able to make the audience chuckle with her sharp wit and reactions to being a “fish out of water” as Mrs. Tripplehorn. The laughs were there, but director Shawn Levy also took the time to show how Phil and Claire were feeling when they were not being chased by thugs or working the pole at a strip club (one of the more hilarious comedic bits in the movie). Without the serious conversations between the two of them regarding where their marriage was going or why the romance had stopped and what they needed to do in order to reconnect, Date Night could have been nothing more than a series of slapstick setups with no real heart to it. Thankfully however, there were those quiet moments where Phil and Claire were able to talk and draw the audience in.

Date Night has its amusing parts which were punctuated by the fact that its main characters were easy to relate to and faced the same problems most real life married couples do (minus the whole being mistaken for another couple and then having to endure a number of crazy situations in order to clear their name thing).


Grade: C+