Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
It's vacation time for outdoorsy Chicago man Chet Ripley, along with his wife, Connie, and their two kids, Buck and Ben. But a serene weekend of fishing at a Wisconsin lakeside cabin gets crashed by Connie's obnoxious brother-in-law, Roman Craig, his wife, Kate, and the couple's two daughters. As the excursion wears on, the Ripleys find themselves at odds with the stuffy Craig family.
The Great Outdoors is a serviceable late-80s John Hughes comedy that leans heavily on broad situational humor and family-vacation tropes without doing much that feels fresh or distinctive. The plot is thin and episodic — a series of comedic set pieces loosely strung together around the fish-out-of-water clash between Chet and Roman. John Candy and Dan Aykroyd have genuine chemistry and charisma, elevating the material above what it deserves on paper, but the supporting cast is largely forgettable. Cinematography is functional at best, capturing the Wisconsin lakeside setting adequately without any particular visual ambition. The film is fairly derivative of Hughes's own suburban-family-comedy formula, offering little novelty beyond its charming leads. The ending wraps things up predictably and neatly without any real dramatic payoff or surprise.