The Great Outdoors (1988)

Kamurai

4.0

Feb 24, 2021

Decent watch at best, probably won't watch again, but can recommend for those on a late-eighties nostalgia kick. Sometimes it is good to get in "The Way Back Machine" and see some of the movies that made people famous, and I liked Dan Aykroyd and John Candy. The duplicitous plot and character choices just didn't sit great with me. Having recently seen "Brother Nature", it is interesting to see a movie that could have inspired it. I think it would have been a lot better with John Candy as an overwhelmingly positive buzzkill and Aykroyd playing a family man. But Candy is sort of the fam…

"The Great Outdoors" is only a moderately entertaining film, although it does feature the unforgettably spectacular sight of John Candy water skiing. The grizzly bear action also works well and there is always an enthusiastic energy about this film which every member of the cast effortlessly maintains, but in terms of John Hughes's output this entry is not one of his more memorable outings and some of it does feel like miscellaneous bottom drawer material that has so far gone unused until now. He has done a reasonable job of using such material - if this indeed happens to be the case - as the…