Just as nostalgia grows with each passing year of adulthood for the family trips one took as children (even the ones that weren't all that great), so, too, is there likely more than a tinge of sentimentality from viewers who grew up watching Clark and Ellen Griswold taking son Rusty and daughter Audrey on a disaster-prone cross-country vacation to amusement park Walley World in 1983's "National Lampoon's Vacation." Three respectable sequels followed—1985's "National Lampoon's European Vacation," 1989's perennial holiday mainstay "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation," and 1997's "Vegas Vacation"—each of them starring Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo. Eighteen years since the last Griswold sojourn, Clark and Ellen have stepped aside to make way for a return trek to Walley World with a now-grown Rusty (Ed Helms) and his own family. As written and directed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein (making their feature helming debuts), the new "Vacation" stands on its own—or so Rusty tells wife Debbie (Christina Applegate) and sons James (Skyler Gisondo) and Kevin (Steele Stebbins) in a double-entendre-filled early scene.
See Dustin Putman, TheFilmFile.com. for full review
