Game Night: Jason Bateman keeps making the same movie over and over again

They meet over their shared love of games of all sorts. So right away you know these are people who you would never want to hang out with.

The couple is having trouble getting pregnant. Annie believes it is due to the stress Max has over his cool, older brother, Brooks (Friday Night Lights’ Kyle Chandler), coming to town. Max and Brooks have always been competitive, and Max has never been able to get the upper hand. This comes to a head when the couple hosts a game night for all of their friends.

Brooks shows up in a vintage sports car, a cherry red Stingray, which happens to be Max’s dream car, and hijacks the evening.

Brooks promises the next game night will be at the house he is renting while he is in town. There, the couples are told that it will be a murder mystery game. Someone will be taken and the others will have to find them. The winner will get that cherry red Stingray.

The only problem, as I’m sure you can tell by the trailers, is that Brooks is actually kidnapped. The others don’t know it isn’t part of the game, and thus begins our film.

Game Night could be a much better movie. It’s not that it is bad, per se. It is just that it cannot fully overcome its shortcomings, namely its low budget that allowed the filmmakers to cast Bateman, McAdams and Chandler, pay a few recognizable faces for three-line cameos, and then populate the other major roles with people you have never seen before, none of whom are…what’s the word for it? Oh yeah, good.

The chief offender is Billy Magnussen, who has been in a lot of movies you’ve seen, but not for very long. He plays Ryan, a dumb but handsome guy that I guess is supposed to steal all of the big laugh lines. My problem is that he is unfathomably stupid.

In real life he would have died trying to prove to his friends that Space Mountain is even more fun if you don’t put the safety bar down.

There are a lot of great visual jokes in Game Night, which is why I hold out hope that, in better hands, it could have been a much funnier movie. Most of those jokes revolve around Max and Annie’s neighbor Gary (Jessie Plemmons, also from Friday Night Lights). He used to be a part of the titular game night but was exiled after getting a divorce from a woman who was actually Max and Annie’s friend. Gary is a cop who lives with a tiny white dog and, for the most part, hangs out alone waiting to be invited back into the group.

I don’t know if this is a symptom of the Parkland shootings or simply of me getting older, but some of the gun humor in this movie made me really uncomfortable. The two big moments that stand out are when Annie, believing she is holding a fake gun, not realizing that the men she has taken the gun from are actual kidnappers, first lip synchs into it like a microphone, and then later sticks it in her mouth for a wacky photo.

Again, it could be a product of the moment, which of course, the filmmakers cannot control, but there was an audible, uneasy sigh from the man sitting behind me when Rachel McAdams stuck a gun in her mouth - you know? For fun!

The script is a little too well-worn. You could tell me Game Night is the sequel to any of a dozen movies Jason Bateman has starred in since his 2003 career renaissance came in the form of Arrested Development, and I would absolutely believe you.

But there are a few nuggets in there that tell you Game Night almost had a chance to be really funny. I keep seeing this compared to another Jason Bateman movie, Horrible Bosses, and I feel exactly the same way about it.

So, if this follows the Horrible Bosses path, you don’t have to worry about seeing Game Night in the theater. It will run at least 52 times next year on Comedy Central.