WE'RE THE MILLERS
Jason Sudeikis as David / Jennifer Aniston as Rose / Emma Roberts as Casey / Will Poulter as Kenny / Ed Helms as Brad Gurdlinger / Nick Offerman as Don Fitzgerald / Kathryn Hahn as Edie Fitzgerald / Thomas Lennon as Rick Nathanson / Mark L. Young as Scottie P. Directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber / Written by Dan Fybel and Rich Rinaldi |
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WE’RE THE
MILLERS is one of those aggressively lewd and crude R-rated comedies that
certainly seemed cutting edge say, I dunno, a few decades ago.
Now, it sort of comes off with a been there, done that
vibe of creative inspiration. There
is certainly a kernel of a compelling premise to the film, not to mention
that it sports a uniformly game cast that is willing to go the distance with
the material to score laughs. However,
WE’RE THE MILLERS – the longer it progresses – seems to have
less and less of an actual story to tell, which is more than emphasized by
the fact that the resulting film feels more like a loose conglomeration of
TV sitcom worthy sketches than a fully realized movie. The setup of this
comedy, though, is easy to like. It
introduces us to a Denver pot dealer named David Clark (Jason Sudeikis, a
good fit for this type of loveably smarmy character) that’s good at what
he does and makes a decent living doing it.
He runs into considerable trouble in the opening sections of the
film when he tries to help his semi-dimwitted and weak-willed teen
neighbor
Kenny (Will Poulter), from being attacked by some street thugs.
While attempting to save the poor sap from certain pummeling and
embarrassment, David finds his best stash – and all of his loot –
stolen, most of which does not belong to him, but rather to his
boss/supplier Brad Gurdlinger (the always funny Ed Helms).
David soon realizes that he is in one pickle of a situation. He decides to
visit his employer and beg for mercy regarding the $43,000 he now owes
him. Brad, who despite being
an outwardly nice chap, is actually a ruthless criminal, but he decides to take
a bit of pity on David: he won’t kill him, but he gives him an
opportunity to repay him through completing a drug smuggling run to
Mexico. The problem being is
that there is no simple and easy way to make it through border patrol
without tipping off the agents that he’s smuggling massive amounts of
pot into America. David
then has an epiphany. He will hide from the border agents…in plain
sight…by posing as a painfully ordinary family man in a large
Winnebago. When he sees
another family that gets off the hook with a local police officer because
of their obnoxious niceness, David realizes that his plan just might work.
One problem:
David has no family. Well, no problem! He
decides to hire one for the road trip.
He manages to easily convince Kenny to pose as his son (mostly
because he has nothing else better to do), but has a bit more trouble with
finding a daughter and wife. He
eventually enlists a perpetually potty mouth street girl, Casey (Emma
Roberts) and a local stripper, Rose (Jennifer Aniston) to becomes his new
daughter and wife respectively. Posing
now as a terrible average family (the Millers), the posse embarks on their
clandestine trip south of the border to secure Gurdlinger’s weed and
bring it back stateside. They
do manage to make it through the border without a hitch in their new RV,
but, rather predictably, when the Millers discover that the amount of weed
is far beyond what they were expecting, complications rear their ugly
heads. That, and the fake
family unit begins to act like a real family unit.
Of the positives
of WE’RE THE MILLERS I will say this: Sudeikis has a knack for playing
agreeable assholes rather well. David
is a persona that’s so uncompromisingly self-centered that it almost
becomes an oddly endearing and hysterical quality about him.
Helms, in just a few scant scenes, is also amusing playing his drug
boss that dresses in luxurious suits and has a penchant for collecting marine life. Also a comedic standout is the 20-year-old Will Poulter, who
manages to play a character that teeters between innocent sweetness and
head smacking stupidity. He’s
also a social virgin when it comes to the act of scoring with girls, so
you
just know that there’s gonna be a scene in the film with his – cough
– sister and mother teaching him the ins and outs or making out.
Poulter’s reactions in scenes like this – and many others in
the film – scores the film's biggest laughs. Yet, for as much
goodwill as some of the cast bestows on this film, there’s no denying
the fact that WE’RE THE MILLERS – if you excuse the road trip genre
pun – is a comedy that spins its wheels a bit too leisurely and
haphazardly. The film’s
setup is inspired as is the build-up to the drug score, but just about
everything that happens after that on the journey back home are made up of
scenes so loosely gathered together that it comes off as if the
writers were making it up as they went along.
There are funny sections here and there – especially with a
running subplot involving the Millers meeting up with another RV traveling
group, played well by the amusing Nick Offerman and Kathryn Hahn – but
in-between those moments of scatological merriment exists a lot of bland
and empty scenes that elicit little, if no, chuckles at all.
The overall script as well – which could have attained the level
of a great sardonic satire in commentating on the nature of the family
unit – really squanders its potential when – gosh darn it! – the
fake family unit begins to care for each other like a real one.
Right. Sure. Uh-huh. Something needs
to be said about Jennifer Aniston in the film.
She’s set-up as a stripper, which means that we’ll inevitably
get a montage of her at some point doing a sensationally arousing
striptease to the ogling enjoyment of not only the male characters in the
film, but also the men in the theatre audience.
Aniston, to be fair, looks sensational, perhaps a bit too
sensational for a down-on-her-luck aging stripper that’s facing monetary
woes. I have no problem, per
se, with witnessing Aniston doing a strip tease in the film – which was
heavily shown in the film’s pre-release publicity – but it shows the
film’s tawdry level of desperation.
That, and Aniston already has played a character that used her
sexuality – and to more darkly hysterical levels - in HORRIBLE BOSSES
(also co-starring Sudeikis). I’m
not altogether sure what convinced her to journey down those same comedic
waters again with her role here. WE’RE THE
MILLERS is definitely funny in parts, but the sum of these agreeable parts
are at odds with the rest of the film, which never really gels together to
form a completely cohesive laugh riot.
That, and the film’s attempts at being a balls-to-the-wall raunch
fest seems kind of disingenuous with the incredulous manner that the
Millers kind of come together and bond as an actual family unit through the
proceedings, which rings as utterly false.
More than anything, WE’RE THE MILLERS just seems to squander its
comedic potential with its uneven scripting and lame brained plot
developments. Its attempts at
marrying bawdiness with sweetness also comes off as forced when other
comedies that have come before it have managed to marry those two tangents to
much better effect. |
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