The Caribbean beckons many vacationers with the promise of peace: gentle waves lapping on the sandy shores; umbrella drinks sipped under azure-blue skies; gentle sunrises over palm trees.
But Marcus and Emily know that peace will play little part in their own Caribbean holiday.
Why? Well, let’s start with two reasons: Ron and Kyla.
Ron and Kyla are to peaceful vacations what nuclear warheads are to quiet dinners at home. They pack chaos in their carry-ons. They don’t buy souvenirs, but trouble. If there’s a bottle with the word “proof” on the label, they’ll drink it. If something looks vaguely like cocaine, they’ll snort it.
And while Marcus and Emily are pretty responsible and straightlaced , they’ve learned—from admittedly exhausting experience—that Ron and Kyle can be kinda fun.
But all play and no work make Marcus a poor boy. So naturally, he’s mixing business with pleasure. He and Emily plan to stay an extra couple of days to meet with folks from Kim Wae, a Korean-based hotel conglomerate. Kim Wae is planning to build a resort in Marcus and Emily’s hometown of Chicago soon, and Marcus would love his construction company to snag the job. He’s counting on the fact that Rob and Kyla—vacation Tasmanian devils that they are—will be safely home by the time he gives his all-important presentation.
Alas, the Kim Wae executives move up the timetable, and Yeon—the conglomerate’s demanding vice president—is eyeing another company for the job. The fact that they’re meeting with Marcus at all, Yeon says, is rather “insulting.”
“For me or for you?” Marcus asks.
“Exactly,” Yeon tells him.
And the surprises just keep on coming. Next up: Reese Hackford, Kyla’s beloved father, who’s fresh from an extended stay at San Quentin and crashes the couples’ vacation.
Reese didn’t deserve all that prison time, he insists. He was just a little aggressive with his tax write-offs, he says. “And all of a sudden, I’m money laundering with criminal intent?” A miscarriage of justice, Reese says—shortly before he shuffles off to conduct a little, um, business with several gun-toting gentlemen.
With the exception of an occasional hurricane, the Caribbean has always looked so peaceful. A quick visit to the Travel Channel will tell you that.
But by the time Marcus and Emily are back in Chicago, the Caribbean itself might be in need of a vacation.
They say love is blind. That’s certainly true in Kyla’s case. She loves her dad, and—despite all sorts of evidence to the contrary—believes he’s a good man. And while her faith in him may be misguided, it’s also kind of touching.
Ron wants to think the best of Reese, too. It’s part of his entire persona, in fact, to think the best of people. He confesses that everyone likes him, in part because he likes everyone. That’s a curiously good lesson in such a curiously shallow, throwaway movie: When we treat people with kindness and (dare I say) love, most tend to respond in kind.
Ron’s own care shows no bounds. He’ll do whatever he can to help any one of his countless friends, and we see plenty of (admittedly not-so-positive) evidence throughout: He subs in for Marcus during a very serious drinking game; he makes sure that someone who participates in said drinking game makes it back to his hotel room safely; he even saves the lives of a few people. But perhaps his most staggering act was to do something incredibly kind for someone he (shocker) didn’t like at all.
Finally, let’s meet Maurillo, a hotel manager from the original Vacation Friends whom the group (curiously) brings along as a babysitter for Ron and Kyla’s little boy. In a film indeed filled with infantile behavior, Maurillo marks himself as perhaps the movie’s most responsible, most honorable adult—drowning in diapers while everyone else is swimming in liquor.
Reese recites the many important events he missed in Kyla’s life while in prison—including the death of Kyla’s mom.
“May Jesus rest her beautiful, precious, lovely soul,” Kyla says. “God, I hated that witch,” Reese adds.
The Kim Wae resort that the couples are staying at includes a “meditation temple.” During their first evening at the resort, Kim Wae officials conduct a ceremony that includes releasing floating lanterns. Marcus is told that the flame inside the lanterns is supposed to represent “happiness and good luck.”
Ron kisses his father-in-law on the head and says “salaam”—gestures meant to convey the ultimate respect, we’re told. (The word is a common greeting in the Islamic world, and Ron says he learned about the kiss from a Kuwaiti sultan.)
Emily and Marcus are trying to have a baby, and Marcus has a loud ovulation calculator that goes off periodically during the movie. When Ron and Kyla hear it on the plane, they suggest that Marcus and Emily commence with some “insemination” in the plane’s lavatory (adding that they’ve used the lavatory for that same purpose). And when they learn that Emily and Marcus will remain on the island after Ron and Kyla leave, Ron suggests they’re staying over for “lots and lots of inseminating.”
As a joke, Kyla calls Marcus and Emily “sex offenders” over an airport loudspeaker. Kyla and Emily both wear outfits that reveal quite a bit of cleavage and, in Kyla’s case, her backside, too. Other women wear bikinis and other suggestive (but beach-appropriate) garb. Ron wears an open button-up shirt. Characters kiss.
Maurillo hopes to hook up with someone during the vacation, leading to a comical misunderstanding. We hear references to being “horny” on vacation. Reese sees some women at the resort and claims they’re obviously “high-priced hookers.” We hear plenty of talk about Marcus’ privates.
Marcus and Ron go out to surf, setting their sights on some pretty dangerous-looking waves. (They’re especially dangerous for Ron, given that his previous “experience” consisted of paddleboarding on a lake; but he feels like he must surf to impress Yeon.) We see Marcus fly off his board, then return to consciousness on the beach as a concerned Yeon and Ron stare down at him.
“That was … violent,” Yeon says. You could say the same for a surprisingly large part of the movie.
Most vacations do not include a great deal of gunfire. The same cannot be said of this one. The two couples and Reese are shot at frequently—mostly from a drug dealer and his lackeys, but at least once by Cuban law enforcement officials (after the party illegally enters Cuban territory). No one gets killed, but plenty of people are imperiled. Bullets hit a Jeep tire, sending the vehicle tumbling down the road. Another hits a plane’s fuel line: The plane crashes and blows up.
Ron is a park ranger now, but he used to be in the special forces. So to impress his grouchy father-in-law, he goes against the service code and tells him how many people he killed (42 confirmed, he says, plus a “couple of iffys.”) He’s forced to repeat those claims by Reese, who’s using the unwitting Ron as his “muscle.”
We hear discussions about bags of severed heads, and threats are made to smear the entrails of family members across floors. A building burns down. Guns are pointed. People nearly die after the shipping container they’re in is dropped into the ocean. Someone’s hit with the butt of the gun, and we see the resulting wound. Ron’s hair catches on fire during a night of alcoholic excess.
Nearly 140 f-words, along with almost 60 s-words. We hear nearly every other profanity known to English speakers as well, including “a–,” “d–n,” “h—,” “d-ck,” “p-ss,” “t-ts” and “p-ssy.” God’s name is misused about 25 times, including six with “d–n.”
So. Much. Drinking.
When the two couples head up to their hotel room, they find a gift basket—including a bottle of $700 rum—waiting for them. Marcus wants to take a shower before they drink it, but Ron and Kyla convince him otherwise. This turns into an extended drinking montage, where we see the couple drink countless rounds of shots as they and other revelers dance on the resort property. It appears that Ron and Kyla use cocaine as well—though Ron sucks it up a straw by his mouth, then blows it on his wife’s clothed rear end.
The next morning, Maurillo (who is, you’ll recall, caring for Ron and Kyla’s baby) finds them passed out on several lounge chairs by the pool, obviously hung over.
Kim Wae executives apparently bond over extreme, even dangerous, drinking games. Yeon (already clearly intoxicated) essentially demands that Marcus join them if he hopes to earn their business. Marcus volunteers Ron instead. He and Kim Wae execs down five shots each as rapidly as they can: When Ron wins, Yeon brings out the company’s ringer, and the two race to consume pint glasses filled with what appears to be whiskey or rum. (Marcus warns Ron that it could be dangerous, but Ron waves him off; one of the drinkers indeed nearly dies but is revived by paramedics.
We see plenty of other drinking episodes as well—and really, it’d be impossible to keep track of all of the imbibing going on here. (Ron and Kyla might well have said the same thing.) Yeon gets seriously toasted during the drinking game and spills a number of confessions that he later regrets.
Reese is sent a package of white powder—the parcel sent in care of Marcus. When Marcus opens it, he’s naturally A) horrified, and B) furious that Reese would ship a five-pound brick of cocaine in care of him, given his business meeting and all. Ron and Kyla are more philosophical: “That’s way more than you’ve ever smuggled in you’re a–, babe,” she says, and the two snort a bit of the powder. Kyla assures them that the coke shouldn’t be a problem: “If we keep plugging away it’ll be gone before you know it.”
[Spoiler warning] Turns out, though, the package isn’t cocaine, but rather Kyla’s mother’s ashes. “I snorted your mom?” Ron asks, aghast. “I did, too,” Kyla adds. “It’s kind of beautiful when you think about it.”
In a tight situation, Ron lights a marijuana joint, telling his compatriots that he always taught kids in his nature classes to do the same thing. (He later amends that he didn’t teach them to smoke weed, but rather to light something on fire if they ever got in a confined space; the smoke always finds its way out.) Emily makes a reference to Valium (suggesting that Marcus could take some like “the rest of us”).
Kyla and Ron are truly horrible parents. Even though both claim in the airport to dote on their child—with Ron saying he never thought he’d be a helicopter parent—a woman returns their baby to them, table, saying she caught the infant crawling under her table. They turn to each other and say, with glee, “He’s crawling?!”
The movie cares very little about the kid, either. His main purpose seems to be to supply the film with a steady supply of defecation/diaper jokes (most told by the long-suffering Maurillo). Oh, and secondarily, baby-abandonment jokes.
Adult characters experience their own share of gastric distress. We’ll not repeat the jokes here, but we do hear a number of suggestions of diarrhea and vomiting. Jokes are made about people defecating in their pants.
Characters gamble, and Emily’s eventually thrown out of a casino for counting cards. Several characters lie. Kyla cooes to her baby, “You should’ve seen Mommy talk her way out of getting arrested last night.” In the airport, she screams for security to stop Maurillo, because he’s carrying anthrax. We see her with airport security behind a closed (but windowed) door, very (and obscenely) upset with security’s lack of humor.
Someone drinks breast milk. Someone tries to steal a great deal of money, though that money itself was the product of the drug trade.
If you’ve seen one Vacation Friends movie, you’ve seen ‘em all. Well, at least, in terms of content.
When I reviewed the first Vacation Friends, I was fairly generous to the film … given the film. Ron and Kyla were nice folks (in their own grating way) and committed friends—and that was “a grain of goodness in an ocean of problems.”
I think the same could be said of Vacation Friends 2. Ron tells us that everyone likes him, and that’s true of me—to a point. We see some give-you-the-shirt-off-my-back generosity here, and that’s nice, too.
But then you get to this sequel’s ocean of problems. And if you’ve read the review up to now, there’s hardly reason point to that ocean again.
Vacation Friends 2 is a silly, salacious, morally vacuous trip. The sights include nights filled with liquor and days filled with bathroom humor. The Caribbean air echoes with the shrill sounds of f-bombs. And while it might be free to those with a subscription to Hulu, it’s not worth even that.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
