Cinema: Rushes: Jul. 4, 1988

THE GREAT OUTDOORS

John Hughes doesn't agonize over his scripts: he is famous for batting out drafts in a few days. And sometimes haste pays off. His teen comedies Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink have the urgency of passion recollected in heat. By contrast, his movies about grownups -- Mr. Mom and the Vacation farces -- come off as slapdash, complacent, a bad blend of Norman Rockwell and National Lampoon. But none of his films seems so hastily conceived, so ill conceived as The Great Outdoors. Hughes must have written it between meals.

Fast food too. In their week at a North Woods cabin, Nice Guy John Candy and his family encounter every unimaginative pestilence: bats, raccoons, stubborn horses, runaway water skis, acid indigestion, puppy love. And, worst of all, a plague of relatives led by Slime King Dan Aykroyd. The comic climax comes when a bear gets its buttocks fur blown off by a shotgun. Anyone out there laughing?

Under Howard Deutch's languid direction, Candy performs the slow burn of a put-upon Mr. Middle America, and Aykroyd perfects his impression (first exhibited in the 1981 film Neighbors) of Richard Nixon as a used-car salesman. It would be nice if these acute comics had achieved the intimate hostility of cousins who rasp on each other's nerves. But Hughes cannot be bothered here with surprise or subtlety, so his antagonists have the fatigued familiarity of sitcom characters toward the end of a long run. Next time, Hughes might consider a longer gestation period for his script. Or maybe a writer's block.