The last days of Rachel McAdams' ass

I thought I’d missed the boat on Game Night, a 2018 comedy a lot of people celebrated as one of the funniest of the year, which I thought was only pretty good. So I watched it again this past weekend … and again thought it was pretty good. However, I did forget significant portions of the third act, lending some credence to something I’d previously suspected: that the reason I didn’t remember it all that well is I was actually asleep for a portion of it. This almost never happens; if I’m about to fall asleep, I’ll pause a movie pretty much without fail. Then again, my mind is not at its sharpest or most absorbent when I continue finishing a film after one of these naps, so that could have been a factor too.

Anyway, the thing I really noticed this time is how much the film notices Rachel McAdams’ butt.

For one, she spends most of the movie poured into a pair of tight fitting jeans. That’s not so uncommon, and does not represent anything out of the ordinary in terms of prurient interests on the part of the filmmakers. If you have assets – particularly if they are ASSets – then show them off.

But the camera does take special notice of her in the pants. There are a couple shots like this, but I think of one shot in particularly in which the camera follows her from the ground up when she’s about to do her little dance to Third Eye Blind’s “Semi Charmed Life” in the biker bar, while shaking her booty and haphazardly spinning around a gun she doesn’t know is loaded. That shot reminded me of a shot Michael Bay might stage of Megan Fox in a Transformers movie, only not as skeevy.

It’s not as skeevy for a number of reasons, but one of those is that McAdams seems to be in on it. The coup de grace in the movie’s ass-fixation is a line of dialogue I remembered from my previous viewing, which finally came in the last ten minutes of the movie. In trying to get out of a pinch in which a henchman may shoot her, she says “No please, I have children at home.” The henchmen fires back a line of dialogue rather than a bullet: “Not with that ass you don’t.” “Oh, thanks!” she says, and then he gets sucked into an airplane engine.

This exchange functions as a funny confirmation of what we’ve been thinking all along if we’ve made note of how the movie is taking in McAdams. There’s almost a cathartic aspect to it, like “Somebody finally mentioned the elephant in the room!”

What I find extra funny about it, though, is that the actual line of dialogue seems to exist for no other reason than as a compliment to McAdams’ physique. In fact, it’s an especially weird choice because one of the film’s main conflicts involves how she and husband Jason Bateman have had trouble conceiving. You might include a line like this if it were designed to serve as a trigger for her character, but it’s not. It’s just a one-off that sets up a punchline in which the man gets sucked into an airplane engine, which McAdams initially celebrates before saying “Oh no, he died!” Which I actually think might be the film’s funniest line. Ass or not, McAdams is a really talented comedienne with great timing and line deliveries.

So this got me wondering just how much of a compliment it is. She knows she’s gifted in the posterior, and she’s willing to let the movie make mention of it. But what if there was an extra aspect of bragging to it? What if she actually HAS had children, and is just flaunting the fact that her ass still looks like this even AFTER children? And since I knew McAdams was probably about 40, her having children was a distinct possibility, even though I remembered no period of professional inactivity or a weight gain in any of her roles.

So to Wikipedia I went. When I saw the “1” appearing next to “Children” in her bio area, I thought “Aha! So Rachel McAdams is, indeed, an incorrigible narcissist!”

Scrolling down to the Personal Life section of her Wikipedia page told a different story. Indeed she does have a child, but that child was born two months after Game Night was released. Clicking on the Game Night link, I scrolled down and discovered that principal photography for the movie occurred during April of 2017. That’d be about three months before McAdams got pregnant.

Now instead of accusing McAdams of excess self regard, I think maybe she knew that she and her boyfriend were trying, and that maybe, indeed, this would be the last time her butt would look quite this good on film. The last time a line of dialogue about how good her butt looked would even be possible.

Game Night is McAdams’ most recent credit on IMDB, and her only future project is that she is “rumored” to be in 2021’s Sherlock Holmes 3 – a rumor that probably only has any traction because she was in the first two movies. So Game Night might not only have been her last chance to show off her butt, it might have been her last role, period, for quite some time as she concentrates on motherhood.

But here’s hoping, for the sake of mothers everywhere, that McAdams will get that ass back if she wants it.

Maybe in time for Game Night 2.