DIRECTOR: Rawson Marshall Thurber
CAST: Jason Sudeikis, Jennifer Aniston, Will Poulter, Emma Roberts, Ed Helms, Nick Offerman, Kathryn Hahn, Molly Quinn, Ken Marino, Tomer Sisley, Thomas Lennon, Luis Guzman
RUNNING TIME: 110 mins
CERTIFICATE: 15
BASICALLY…: In order to get past the feds without detection whilst smuggling marijuana across the Mexican border, drug dealer David (Sudeikis) puts together a fake family consisting of stripper Rose (Aniston), runaway Casey (Roberts) and virgin Kenny (Poulter)…
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NOW FOR THE REVIEW…
After Jennifer Aniston’s surprisingly dirty turn as a horrible boss in, erm, Horrible Bosses, you wouldn’t be alone in assuming that the days of headlining mediocre romantic-comedies are starting to be put behind her. And you’d be right – now she’s headlining mediocre comedies instead!
While We’re The Millers is far from being among the worst comedies we’ve seen so far this year – and in this reviewer’s opinion, nothing can top, or “bottom” if you will, The Internship – its biggest crime is that for most of it, the jokes don’t really work and they look really awkward on the screen. For example, you’d expect the much-hyped three-way kissing scene between pretend mother Aniston, pretend son Will Poulter (far and away the funniest person in the movie, his innocence and geekiness is charmingly wonderful) and pretend daughter/sister Emma Roberts to be a lot more edgy and therefore funnier. Instead, it is disappointingly slow-paced and the staging is a little off. You can’t entirely fault director Rawson Marshall Thurber for making the scene more uncomfortable than it is really funny, because the slight lack of chemistry between these three cast members is what truly makes the scene fall flat.
As for its also-hyped promises of Aniston doing a highly-choreographed striptease in the middle of a warehouse for no real reason, the scene is fine and at times funny thanks to the reactions of the rest of the cast. Case in point, there is a cute moment when Sudeikis looks into the camera and raises his eyebrows, acknowledging the lusting audience just as John Belushi did in Animal House’s ladder scene. But again, there’s no real purpose to the entire thing. Well, there is, but there was surely another way of getting around to doing that. While not as awkward as the three-way kissing scene, and if anything Aniston shows real bravery in committing to a scene that will undoubtedly be uploaded to YouTube in a record amount of time for perverts to gush over, it’s forceful in its trying to show off the former Friends star as an actress who can do all these adult things.
While not being especially funny, it does have its moments at times. Poulter has some of the film’s best moments, and Nick Offerman and Kathryn Hahn are also pretty hilarious as a couple which the family meets along the way. Their impromptu swingers session with Aniston and Sudeikis is the right kind of intentionally awkward, all played for laughs and all the more funny for it. If only the rest of the humour in this film was just like this.
Ed Helms does have fun in what is just an extended cameo as an eccentric drug baron, but the other villain – a drug cartel boss who Helms steals his name from as a cover – is incredibly weak. Unmemorable, lacking any sort of menace and defeated far too easily in the film’s rushed climax, he’s one of those bad guys who you could cut from the whole film and it wouldn’t be that detrimental to the overall story. He’s more of an annoyance than a proper threat. Then again, without him we wouldn’t have Aniston’s stripping scene be one of the main selling points for this movie. And when that is what they choose to advertise the most above any of the film’s instances of humour, you know that it is severely lacking in that department.
SO, TO SUM UP…
It’s not as funny as you’d like it to be, with scenes more awkward than laugh-out-loud, but We’re The Millers ranks as just OK thanks to Will Poulter’s extremely likable turn and a few sprinkles of bittersweet warmth that would have probably benefited a funnier movie.
