On an exciting journey that began by taking Ad Clark Griswold to his family to a different place. The man found himself a consumer when he took his family across the country to Wally World, a California theme park. Things are quite wrong, but Clark Griswold loses his thought of a mysterious blonde in a red Ferrari that changed his life later.
It's a pleasant diversion with a few memorable bits and a likable cast, but true comic invention is hard to locate in the meandering screenplay by the late John Hughes.
The result is not so much a comedy about American values as a 2,500 mile skid on a banana skin. The visual gags come thick and fast, and are about as subtly signposted as the exit markers on a freeway.
Half-baked but occasionally hilarious, National Lampoon's Vacation gets a reasonable amount of mileage out of depicting the disaster-prone journey of a "typical" family of four, the Griswolds of suburban Chicago.
