The Great Outdoors (1988)

The Great Outdoors arrives from 1988, a John Hughes production directed by Howard Deutch, in which John Candy and Dan Aykroyd spend ninety minutes discovering that a rented cabin in northern Wisconsin is too small for two families and one inflatable ego. Chet Ripley wants hot dogs and quiet. Roman Craig wants lobster and leverage. A grizzly bear with a bald head eventually settles the argument. This is the entire architecture of the thing, and it holds up about as well as a screen door in a thunderstorm.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a vacuum. The cast is uniformly white and the screenplay never glances at the question. Women occupy the roles of wife, sister, and summer girlfriend, and the movie has no interest in disturbing those arrangements. Roman's money is treated as a personality flaw, not a systemic indictment, so the class friction stays inside the family instead of reaching for any larger argument. Race, climate, body image, and neurological difference are simply not subjects here. Nobody lectures. Nobody has a thesis. The bear does not represent anything.

We are left with a comedy of irritations, and the irritation is largely mutual. Critics at the time were unkind, and the decades have not softened the verdict. What the film offers is the specific pleasure of watching two gifted comic performers negotiate a bat in a bedroom and a ninety-six ounce steak, which is a modest pleasure, honestly earned. It is a relic of a moment when a summer comedy could be about nothing at all and still get made. We classify it accordingly, and we move on to the next specimen.