Date Night is a film that means well. It stars Steve Carell as Phil Foster and Tina Fey as his beloved albeit boring wife Claire. They’re just an average married couple: wake up, make lunches for their children, go to work, come home. Relatable to most people, obviously. However director Shawn Levy once again turns everything into one giant cliché, the way he did Night at the Museum, Cheaper by the Dozen and more comparably, Just Married. His films gestate with ideas that are good enough, but like every movie need further expansion. That’s where Date Night fails. It never does anything past the bare minimum in order to get by.

Phil and Claire Foster are boring, as I said, and quite unhappy about it as well. One night in an attempt to be remotely adventurous for just one night Phil steals the reservations of another couple at a super-social hipster eatery. That’s where the adventure turns deadly, when two mobsters mistake Phil and Claire as the Tripplehorns, two people under which the original appointment was set who are involved in some sort of criminal misdemeanor. Date Night starts and stops too many times to count, turning from a fun action-comedy to a political scandal that jumps at you like a major WTF? moment.

What made Date Night such an interesting project was the pairing of its two major players, Steve Carell (The Office, The 40-Year-Old Virgin) and Tina Fey (30 Rock, SNL). Watching the magic spark between these two the way Carell and Fey do on their respectable NBC sitcoms was a dream in comedy fantasia. Alas, like a lot of the movie, every time an enthralling sidepiece comes into the cards Levy jolts the camera to another scene where more often than not something isn’t going as well as it should. Date Night is too rushed to ever let the audience feel the supposed chemistry between Claire and Phil that keep the husband and wife tag-team going, nor for Carell and Fey to show it.

Like Levy’s Night at the Museum and its tedious sequel, aha cameos are galore. Kristen Wiig, James Franco, Mila Kunis, and J.B. Smoove are welcome (Kunis and Franco share the one funny scene in the entire film), and sadly Olivia Munn, Common, Leighton Meester, and Mark Ruffalo are not needed too much. They drastically distract from the story, and like Carell and Fey aren’t used to the best of their individual abilities. It’s pointless, there’s no way of getting around it.

Date Night’s one saving grace is the enforcement of more females in comedy, a positive I’m fairly sure Levy didn’t mean to stumble upon. Seeing Tina Fey headline both this film as well as her usual stint on 30 Rock makes me hope that maybe one day all women in movies won’t be demeaned like Kristen Bell in When in Rome or Cameron Diaz in What Happens in Vegas. Nonetheless Date Night isn’t worth paying a babysitter for. Only if you and your loved one enjoy extremely generic romantic-comedies do I recommend the both of you witness Date Night; if not skip out on perhaps the first sincerely forgettable movie of 2010.

2 ½ out of 5 stars.

Watch my full review of Date Night here!