There are few things in life as crushingly reliable as a Jason Bateman comedy.

From the very beginning, expectations are kept firmly in check. There’s not a single person under any misapprehension with what they’re settling in for with one of these plainly titled films – Horrible Bosses, Identity Thief, Couples Retreat, Office Christmas Party – and the ensuing 100 minutes is usually passable if impossible to remember soon after, like eating at a Pizza Hut. Bateman remains an engaging comic presence but his latter forays into dramatic material, such as his awards-worthy douchebaggery in The Gift and his morally conflicted antihero of Ozark, tease at more beneath the overplayed mugging.

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His latest effort, the cryptically titled Game Night (you’ll never guess), posits him in familiar territory. He plays Max, one half of an uber-competitive couple with wife Annie (Rachel McAdams). The pair host a weekly game night (wait, did you guess?!), with close friends and take great pleasure in regularly coming out on top. But when Max’s far more successful brother Brooks (Kyle Chandler) comes back to town, a different form of rivalry takes over. After Brooks invites the group to his place for game night, a new game is introduced: a murder mystery of sorts but one that has extreme real world consequences.

Kicking off with a snappy montage of the couple enjoying a life filled with the thrill of winning, there’s a likable, and at times, stylish slickness to Game Night that makes it a pleasant, high-spirited watch. The script, from relative unknown Mark Perez, feels a bit more fully drafted than most recent studio comedies peppering scenes with leftfield pop culture references (Skeet Ulrich! Donnie Wahlberg! Uma Thurman’s hands!) and some actual laughs out loud. The cast is also, ahem, game and the ensemble nature of the plotting means that a variety of performers are given the opportunity to shine.

It’s a pleasure to see McAdams back in light, zippy mode and her character is as central as Bateman’s, the script refusing to suffocate her with the still-persistent nagging, joyless wife role. She’s as petty and competitive as he is and the two share a warm, sparky chemistry. It’s also great to see Sharon Horgan cast as the latest, sort-of love interest for their long-term air-head friend Ryan, played by Billy Magnussen. It’s her first Hollywood role and while she’s effortlessly funny as usual, she suffers slightly from the Tina Fey effect. Like Fey, she’s a remarkable writer and we’ve grown accustomed to seeing her play richly drawn, deeply flawed characters that she’s created herself. Although she makes the most of her so-so dialogue, it’s hard not to imagine how much funnier it would have been if she was still scripting (see pretty much any sub-par film starring Tina Fey as correlating evidence). In other words, I await a Horgan-scripted movie with great impatience.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Billy Magnussen and Sharon Horgan in Game Night Photograph: Hopper Stone/SMPSP

Following on from his odiously well-observed work in Ingrid Goes West, Magnussen is one of the film’s MVPs, selling the familiar dumb guy shtick with ease, spinning repetitive beats into a string of funny moments. If nothing else, the film acts as a persuasive calling card for his skills as a comedic actor and a smart director should be frantically assembling a starring vehicle for him after this hits. There’s strong support from Pitch’s Kylie Bunbury and New Girl’s Lamorne Morris but a rather misjudged turn from Jesse Plemons as a creepy law enforcement neighbor. The film overestimates how many scenes he can steal and all comic energy is frustratingly deflated whenever he’s around.

One of the major problems with the action-comedy-thriller hybrid is an inarguable imbalance between the genres, the laughs taking priority above all else. The crime plot can often feel grafted on from a kids movie thanks to half-assed plotting and cartoonish henchmen. But there’s more effort than usual here to flesh out the non-comedy elements. There are some stylish directorial choices (some nifty tilt-shift photography makes the suburban streets look like they’re part of a board game), the violence doesn’t feel neutered and the action is surprisingly well-staged. It’s an improvement from the glut of tonally uncomfortable genre mash-ups we’ve had to endure in recent years (step forward Keeping Up with the Joneses, Let’s Be Cops, The Bounty Hunter, Identity Thief, Hot Pursuit, etc).

The Jason Bateman comedy model hasn’t quite been radically altered in Game Night but it’s one of his more entertaining outings. Just don’t count on remembering much of it once the night is over.