Date Night (2010)

There is a moment, roughly forty minutes into Date Night, when a Ford Crown Victoria taxicab becomes physically fused to an Audi R8 and the two vehicles proceed through Manhattan as a single, screaming organism. This is the film's thesis statement, delivered without apology. Shawn Levy has assembled a mistaken-identity caper about a New Jersey couple who steal a dinner reservation and inherit a mob vendetta, and he has done so with the brisk, unbothered efficiency of a man who knows exactly what he is selling. Steve Carell and Tina Fey are the product, and they are excellent product. The screenplay gives them banter, panic, and a scene in which Claire must pose as a stripper while Phil pretends to be her pimp. It is a 2010 studio comedy, and it behaves like one.

The supporting cast is notably integrated. Taraji P. Henson appears as Detective Arroyo, the honest cop who arrives in the third act to arrest everyone corrupt. Common plays a thug with a gun and a limited interest in negotiation. Neither role pauses to announce itself. They are simply people in a crime plot, cast from a wider pool than the genre strictly requires, and the film treats this as unremarkable, which it is. Claire works as a realtor and holds her own in a fight, though the film has no argument to make about why that matters. The strip club sequence plays the female body for a laugh in the traditional manner, and no one involved seems to have considered an alternative.

The villains are corrupt police officers on a mob payroll, blackmailing a district attorney with photographs of poor judgment. This is crime plotting, sturdy and old, with no interest in the systems that produce it. The Fosters want their marriage back. They get it, along with a helicopter and a SWAT team. The film ends with a kiss on the lawn and a sky full of stars, and it asks nothing of us beyond ninety minutes and a mild tolerance for taxicab physics. A modest vintage. Drink it young.