SUMMER CAMP (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Summer Camp, Roadside Attractions

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 30, 2024

Nothing about Summer Camp is particularly funny—even the outtakes during the end credits. That second part is only notable because of the cast. The movie stars Diane Keaton, Kathy Bates, and Alfre Woodard in the leading roles of three best friends, and one would think the combination of this trio of actors might have resulted in some fun between takes.

They certainly appear to be having a good time, and that's good for them. Within the confines of obvious material that's struggling for humor, though, even the minor improvisations and little mistakes that don't make the final cut aren't amusing. The filmmakers clearly expect these three, as well as the supporting cast, to carry the material, but the outtakes basically prove there isn't much for the cast to lift in the first place.

There is one somewhat funny line during the credits, coming from Josh Peck as Jimmy, a camp counselor who can't catch a break and keeps messing up each job he's transferred to over the course of the story. That's a decent joke in theory, although writer/director Castille Landon doesn't know what to do with the idea—like all of the slivers of ideas here. No, it's when Jimmy (or Peck breaking character) points out that one of the many activities our protagonists participate in during the movie looks a lot like an AARP commercial. It's kind of funny because it's sort of true.

To the movie's miniscule credit, it's not really about the gags, although how much of that description is accurate and how much it comes down to the absence of any real laughs here is up for some debate. It's the story of three best friends who met in summer camp decades ago, promised to stay close for the rest of their lives, and slid on that agreement over the years as careers, marriages, kids, and other aspects of life got in the way.

Bates plays Ginny, a self-made self-help guru who has achieved some celebrity with her no-nonsense approach to unlicensed therapy. She travels the country in an RV, presumably giving speeches and signing books and making television appearances, and she's famous enough, apparently, that someone tried to kill her. There's no joke in this, and neither is there much of a setup to the fact her RV is rigged with a security system. The screenplay has an odd habit of establishing potential jokes for later, such as Ginny's gift of sex toys to her friends and some of those various camp activities, but never paying them off in any way.

Instead, Ginny, workaholic corporate chemist Nora (Keaton), and Mary (Woodard), a nurse, attend a camp reunion, occasionally get into some trouble, and eventually talk about their lives and feelings to each other or characters whose entire existence in the story is serve as a soundboard for some heartfelt monologues. Ginny's lonely, having chosen not to have a traditional family because she thought her friends were enough—a lot of good that has done as they've drifted apart. Nora's a widow who occupies all of her time with work or thinking about her job. Mary wanted to be a doctor, and after 35 years of marriage to a guy who turned out to be a hapless control freak, she's miserable.

The characters make some sense, and the actors are, as these three usually are, entertaining to watch. Everything about the story, the attempted gags, the blossoming romances with a pair of fellow former campers, and the move toward sentimentality, though, feels entirely calculated.

The humor definitely doesn't work in that register and especially since most of it amounts to cheap slapstick (Jimmy's mishaps, Nora falling out of a canoe, a contrived food fight in the cafeteria, and a half-hearted pillow fight in the women's cabin, for some of laziest examples). Those romances—Stevie D (Eugene Levy) for Nora and Tommy (Dennis Haysbert) for Mary—just go through the motions with little chemistry. By the time each of the main characters gets a scene confessing their personal problems, we realize that none of this other stuff actually matters to the story Landon is trying to tell.

When the movie finally gets to the baring of emotions and those heart-to-hearts, it's slightly refreshing, if only because there's finally a point to it all. Even so, Summer Camp remains contrived and overly deliberate in these sincere moments, too. It's not just a hollow exercise in comedy. The movie feels fake in all of its efforts.

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