Rough Night, directed and co-written by Lucia Aniello—who has also written and directed numerous episodes of Broad City—is the latest entry in the “women whooping it up” genre, and it doesn’t make any of the above questions easier to answer. Jess, now with clipped conservative hair, is running for state senator, and she and her fiancée, Peter (Paul W. Downs), are so respectable and adult that they’re already like an old married couple, too bone-weary for sex. Her college roommate Alice (Jillian Bell) is the one who insists on reuniting the old crew for an elaborate bachelorette weekend in Miami — including freelance radical Frankie (Ilana Glazer) and Blair (Zoë Kravitz), now a sleek corporate type — even if their paths have diverged since their dorm-room days of midnight Doritos and beer pong. There’s a male stripper—make that two male strippers, at least in the literal sense that two brawny guys end up stripping down. Which isn’t to say it’s anything close to what what women want. And when they learn that the wealthy swingers next door, played with a bit too much on-the-nose hambone smarminess by Demi Moore and Ty Burrell, have surveillance cameras that may have recorded their cover-up scheme, they send Blair over to the house to sleep with the couple — a twist that would have worked better if Zoë Kravitz had more of a comic angle to play.
– A mostly female cast gathers for director Lucia Aniello's Rough Night, which reveals just how bad a bachelorette weekend with college friends can get, especially when male strippers are involved. If this plot seems a bit tired to you, you're not alone. The movie has a lackluster approval rating of about 50% among critics on Rotten Tomatoes, despite big-name stars such as Scarlett Johannson and Kate McKinnon. Samples: Rough Night "offers a few sight gags that are pure, dumb genius" and "is at its best when it catches the precise crosscurrent between sleazy and breezy." But when the movie takes a dark turn, "it starts to fall apart," Stephanie Zacharek writes at Time. "As Hangover-style dumb entertainments go, it's certainly good enough," she adds, but she isn't sure this is "anything close" to what women want to see. Owen Gleiberman, on the other hand, says Rough Night is "a perfect example of why Hollywood needs (many) more women filmmakers." Though its formula is quite "derivative," its female perspective makes it fresh, he writes at Variety. The best elements: "the feisty, claws-out spontaneity of its competitive banter between 'sisters' who love and hate each other" and Jillian Bell, "the film's comic spark plug." Leah Greenblatt was less tickled. Rough Night is "a raunchy, wildly off-the-rails farce" that "feels like the summer-movie equivalent of a fidget spinner: shiny, manic, and spiraling to nowhere," she writes at Entertainment Weekly. She does commend the casting—naming Ty Burrell and Demi Moore, who play a swingers couple—but adds the actors have to deal with a "loose cannon of a script." "Well, at least they got the title right," begins Adam Graham at the Detroit News. The rest of his review is no less harsh. "Rough Night is a dismal, excruciating experience, a tired retread of raunchy comedy tropes that can't be bothered to come up with any funny or original bits," he writes. Like one of its characters on cocaine, "it's frantic, scattered and convinced of its own greatness," then "empty and rather sad."