Instead of going on a miserable vacation this summer, you can go to the multiplex and see a lousy movie called “Vacation,” for much less time and money. I’m assuming this was the logic used by the makers of “Vacation”; surely they weren’t trying to make a good movie, were they?
The latest reboot of the “National Lampoon’s Vacation” series from the 1980s features a now-grown Rusty Griswold (Ed Helms, pleasantly dorky), determined to take his family — as his father did before him — on a cross-country driving trip to the California theme park Walley World. Everything, of course, goes terribly wrong, both for the Griswolds and for the audience.