Congratulations. You just snuck into Mexico.

We’re the Millers

(2013)

Last summer’s surprise hit comedy is more notable for what it doesn’t do than what it does, given its major selling points. It’s a pot comedy in which no one smokes any pot. It also features Jennifer Aniston as a stripper who doesn’t actually strip. And it’s replete with gross out and sex gags but reveals itself to be deeply, deeply conservative in nature. Oh, and most importantly of all it’s a comedy that isn’t terribly funny.

This is one of those laughers that has come together (or fallen apart) through improvisation. Sometimes that works (Anchorman) sometimes it doesn’t (here). Rawson Marshall Thurber had a big hit a decade ago with a comedy that is funny, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, but his modus operandi here seems to be that, if he gives his players enough slack, they’ll come up with the goods. Which fails resoundingly.

The premise is sound enough, as one that might eke out a few chuckles, even given the stretch of its drug smuggling backbone; an unlikely quartet pose as a family in order to courier two metric tonnes of weed across the border from Mexico (the stupidest part of this, not that I should really be looking for logic anyway, has a drug dealer who’d for some reason actually believe he’d be paid £100k to smuggle a tiny amount of weed). You’ve got the small time dealer “dad” (Jason Sudeikis), the stripper “mom” (Jennifer Aniston), the virgin “son” (Will Poulter) and the runaway “daughter” (Emma Roberts).

All easy, obvious hooks on which to hang mirth. And (of course!) through the hijinks that ensue they come to know the meaning and importance of a real nuclear family! Isn’t it adorable! But as it’s R-rated and edgy really, throw in a ball-biting spider (and because it hasn’t been done umpteen times, show the inflamed results too, as that hasn’t been par for the course at all since There’s Something About Mary. The hilarity!) And some jokes about big black cocks (basically an uninspired version of When Harry Met Sally’s loony charades game) and swingers (really? Is this 1975?)

The gang succeeds in their mission to cross the border during the first half of the movie, which means by the second, when they are pursued by a drug lord and encounter a narcotics cop, everyone is going through the motions of trying to keep the ship from sinking. The obsession with quality control-free improv means most of Sudeikis’ lines fall flat. Worse he only ever sounds like he’s making stuff up on the spot; there’s no attempt to maintain character (at one point he breaks the fourth wall, which is actually infinitely preferable to circling the same “daring” routines over and over).

As non-descript a lead as Sudeikis is, and as ineffectual a comedian, he fares better than Ed Helms as his drug dealer boss. Helms is a complete wash out, repeating painfully unfunny from riffs about his pet killer whale and new-found passion for ice sculptures. It’s horrific to see him dying so resoundingly. Aniston is a good sport, and looks great, but she was frankly funnier and sexier in Horrible Bosses. Both Poulter and Roberts acquit themselves well, and it’s telling that the funniest scene involves the girl Poulter is besotted with walking in on “mom” and “sis” teaching him how to kiss (that’s right, the brand comedians don’t contribute).

Nick Offerman and Kathryn Hahn as fellow RV holidaymakers are also improvising like crazy, but because they maintain character and all-important deadpan they have a better hit ratio than Sudeikis (Hahn has a particularly good line about throwing a hot dog down a hallway). But this movie is the predictable face of current US comedy movies all over. It must feature a toothless cavalcade of affirmative encounters punctuated by as many tiresomely predictable crude, witless or crass gags (speaking of which Luis Guzman is an “any role any time anywhere” guy these days, isn’t he?) If the approach is that any given nob gag will hit the spot, it’s no wonder the result is as a limp as this (there’s even “enough” material for an extended version; I’d hoped those were on the way out).

The only upside to this picture is that if features weed but Seth Rogen doesn’t appear. Maybe because he wasn’t allowed to get off his tits. Sudeikis does his best to be as nearly as charmless a lead. I haven’t minded him elsewhere (although, come to think of it, I’m only really conscious of him from Horrible Bosses). If this is a Chevy Chase Vacation movie in all but name, and without Chase, it bodes horribly for Sudeikis assuming the mantle of Fletch in the upcoming Fletch Won. This is exactly the type of movie that becomes a big hit out of nowhere and then no one can remember how or why they saw it, or even if they saw it, a year later. A much more likeable movie (nothing great, but likeable, which is a key distinction) about a fake family came out a few years back called The Joneses. Somehow that one managed to pull off the trick of bringing them all together at the end without making the viewer feel physically ill.

Comments

He’s probably paranoid, high-strung, doesn’t like daylight. You know, has a lot of crumbs in his beard, if he has a beard.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) (SPOILERS) I’d like to report I had a blast with Godzilla vs. Kong . It’s lighter on its oversized, city-stomping feet than its slog of a MonsterVerse predecessor, Godzilla: King of the Monsters , and there are flashes of visual inspiration along with several engaging core ideas (which, to be fair, the series had already laid the seeds for). But this sequel still stumbles in its chief task: assembling an engaging, lively story that successfully integrates both tiny humans and towering titans.

It's Dark Age, by Jupiter!

The Dig (2021) (SPOILERS) An account of the greatest archaeological find Britain would know until Professor Horner opened the barrow at Devil’s End. And should you scoff at such “ fiction ”, that’s nothing on this adaptation of John Preston’s 2007 novel concerning the Sutton Hoo excavations of the late 1930s. The Dig , as is the onus of any compelling fictional account, takes liberties with the source material, but the erring from the straight and narrow in this case is less an issue than the shift in focus from characters and elements successfully established during the first hour.

You stink, my friend.

Mulan (2020) (SPOILERS) Let that be a lesson to Disney. It’s a fool’s errand to try and beat the Chinese at their own game, no matter how painstakingly respectful – or rather, pandering – you are. Indeed, Mulan ’s abysmal $40m box office take in the country – where it did get a proper release, so no plandemic excuses can be cited – feels like a direct rebuke; don’t try and tell us how to suck eggs. There’s an additional explanation too, of course. That Mulan sucks.

Our "Bullshit!" team has unearthed spectacular new evidence, which suggests, that Jack the Ripper was, in fact, the Loch Ness Monster.

Amazon Women on the Moon (1987) Cheeseburger Film Sandwich . Apparently, that’s what the French call Amazon Women on the Moon . Except that it probably sounds a little more elegant, since they’d be saying it in French (I hope so, anyway). Given the title, it should be no surprise that it is regarded as a sequel to Kentucky Fried Movie . Which, in some respects, it is. John Landis originally planned to direct the whole of Amazon Women himself, but brought in other directors due to scheduling issues. The finished film is as much of a mess as Kentucky Fried Movie , arrayed with more miss sketches than hit ones, although it’s decidedly less crude and haphazard than the earlier picture. Some have attempted to reclaim Amazon Women as a dazzling satire on TV’s takeover of our lives, but that’s stretching it. There is a fair bit of satire in there, but the filmmakers were just trying to be funny; there’s no polemic or express commentary. But even on such moderate t

Roswell was a smokescreen, we've had a half a dozen better salvage operations.

The X-Files 1.24: The Erlenmeyer Flask The Erlenmeyer Flask makes for a fast-paced, tense and eventful ride, but does it make any sense? That less than mattered at the time, but revisiting the mythology arc (for probably the fourth or fifth time) reveals increasingly tenuous internal coherence as the various conspiracy elements begin to pile up and the situations become ever-more convoluted. This will become the Chris Carter’s signature: don’t examine the details too closely, go with the flow. Trust Chris implicitly.

UFO IN MOSSINGHAM?

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (2020) (SPOILERS) One might reasonably suggest the recourse of the ailing or desperate franchise is to resort, seemingly out of nowhere, to space aliens. Even Police Academy didn’t go that far (to Moscow, yes, but not to space). Perhaps animators think kids have no skills of discernment and will swallow any old sugar-coated crap. Perhaps they don’t, and they will. Ice Age had been enjoying absurd success until Collision Course sent Scrat spinning into the cosmos and grosses tumbled. Shaun the Sheep has been around for a quarter of a century, but this is only his second movie outing and already he’s pulling an E.T. on us. Of course, this may all be part of the grand scheme, and Nick Park is simply doing his bit to familiarise the tots in time for Project Blue Beam.

Wow. Asteroids are made of farts. Okay. I got it.

Greenland (2020) (SPOILERS) Global terror porn for overpopulation adherents as Gerard Butler and his family do their darnedest to reach the safety of a bunker in the titular country in the face of an imminent comet impact. Basically, what if 2012 were played straight? These things come to test cinemas in cycles, of course. Sean Connery struggled with a duff rug and a stack of mud in Meteor , while Deep Impact plumbed for another dread comet and Armageddon an asteroid. The former, owing to the combined forces of Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin, was a – relatively – more meditative fare. The latter was directed by Michael Bay. And then there’s Roland Emmerich, who having hoisted a big freeze on us in The Day After Tomorrow then wreaked a relatively original source of devastation in the form of 2012 ’s overheating Earth’s core. Greenland , meanwhile, is pretty much what you’d expect from the director of Angel Has Fallen .

Careful how much boat you’re eating.

Onward (2020) (SPOILERS) Pixar’s Bright , or thereabouts. The interesting thing – perhaps the only interesting thing – about Onward is that it’s almost indiscernible from a DreamWorks Animation effort, where once they cocked a snook at such cheap-seats fare, seeing themselves as better class of animation house altogether. Just about everything in Onward is shamelessly derivative, from the Harry Potter /fantasy genre cash-in to the use of the standard Pixar formula whereby any scenario remotely eccentric or exotic is buried beneath the banal signifiers of modern society: because anything you can imagine must be dragged down to tangible everyday reference points or kids won’t be able to assimilate it. And then there’s the choice of lead voices, in-Disney star-slaves Chris Pratt and Tom Holland.

By heaven, I’d thrash the life out of you… if I didn’t have to read the Nine O’Clock News.

The Green Man (1956) (SPOILERS) The Green movie from Launder and Gilliat starring Alastair Sim that isn’t Green for Danger. Which is to say, The Green Man can’t quite scale the heady heights of that decade-earlier murder mystery triumph, but neither is it any slouch. Sim is the antagonist this time – albeit a very affable, Sim-ish one – and his sometime protégée, a young George Cole, the hero. If the plot is entirely absurd, Robert Day’s movie wastes no time probing such insufficiencies, ensuring it is very funny, lively and beautifully performed.

Well, I’ll be damned. It’s the gentleman guppy.

Waterworld (1995) (SPOILERS) The production and budgetary woes of “ Kevin’s Gate ” will forever overshadow the movie’s content (and while it may have been the most expensive movie ever to that point – adjusted for inflation, it seems only Cleopatra came close – it has since turned a profit). However, should you somehow manage to avoid the distraction of those legendary problems, the real qualitative concerns are sure to come sailing over the cognitive horizon eventually; Waterworld is just so damned derivative. It’s a seafaring Mad Max. Peter Rader, who first came up with the idea in 1986, admitted as much. David Twohy, who later came aboard, also cited Mad Max 2 ; that kind of rip-off aspect – Jaws birthing Piranha – makes it unsurprising Waterworld was once under consideration by Roger Corman (he couldn’t cost it cheaply enough). Ultimately, there’s never a sufficient sense the movie has managed to become its own thing. Which is a bummer, because it’s frequently quite good fun.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog