We're the Millers

Cast of Characters:
Rose O’Reilly - Jennifer Aniston
David Clark - Jason Sudeikis
Casey Mathis - Emma Roberts
Don Fitzgerald - Nick Offerman
Edie Fitzgerald - Kathryn Hahn
Kenny Rossmore - Will Poulter
Brad Gurdlinger - Ed Helms

Director - Rawson Marshall Thurber
Screenplay - Bob Fisher, Steve Faber, Sean Anders & John Morris
Rated R for crude sexual content, pervasive language, drug material and brief graphic nudity

      Horrible Bosses co-stars Jennifer Aniston and Jason Sudeikis reunite as the leads in the drug comedy We’re the Millers. That’s right, you saw the little striptease during the trailer. Brad Pitt actually gave that up?

      Cue all the Miami Heat fanboys now, "Manz, like hataz gon hate, yo!" David Clark (Jason Sudeikis) - no relation to the Dave Clark Five, I'm assuming - is a Colorado drug dealer that sells pot out of his apartment. After being robbed of not only his money, but his supply as well, he finds himself $43,000 in the hole with a wealthy client of his, Brad Gurdlinger (Ed Helms). Brad’s willing to let David make it up to him though by picking up just a “smidge, maybe a smidge and a half” of marijuana out of Mexico. If he’s successful he’ll not only have his debt paid off, but he’ll also be paid $100,000.

      Knowing that going in and out of Mexico by himself is like waving a huge red flag for the authorities, David decides to create a fake family to take with him in order to throw off the Border Patrol. With the awkward and shy virgin Kenny (Will Poulter), who lives in the same apartment complex as David, the moody runaway Casey (Emma Roberts) and the stripper Rose (Jennifer Aniston), who also lives in David’s apartment complex, they become the Millers.

      If you’ve seen Horrible Bosses, you’ll know that both Aniston and Sudeikis hit it out of the park with their respective roles. Aniston was great playing against the type she’s been known for, and Sudeikis was a dependable comic sidekick to Jason Bateman’s straight man. The challenge here for Sudeikis was whether or not he could handle the task of playing a leading role. Despite picking a number of really bad film choices, Aniston’s proved herself as a leading lady in films such as Office Space, Bruce Almighty, Friends With Money, and the underrated The Good Girl. Sudeikis, although a likeable presence onscreen, still has a lot to prove as a leading actor and I’m not convinced he’s quite there yet. Plus, the chemistry between him and Aniston, while not bad, was just okay. The problem here is the half-baked and lazy script with jokes and setups so forced and contrived it was like watching toddlers trying to cram the square block into the toy circle hole (Remember those toys?). Hey, let’s make Aniston’s character a stripper. Why? So she can have a scene where she strips for some drug dealers. "Oh, so you're a stripper? Huh... well, prove it." Don’t get me wrong, the guy in me was like, “Hell, yes!”. The writer in me though was like, “Hell, yes! The setup still sucks though.” Then we have Kenny getting bit by a spider solely as a setup for a throwaway gross out gag involving his swollen nuts. It's weak setups followed by weak payoffs, just lazy writing with no thought. In fact, the writers were probably the ones that stole David's stash. Plus, the movie commits one of my cardinal sins during the closing credits - film outtakes. You know what closing credit outtakes tell me? It tells me you have no confidence in your film, so let's just throw in a bunch of film screw ups that will most surely make you laugh since the film as a whole couldn't do the trick for you. One thing the film does have in its favor though - Nick Offerman (probably best known for TV's Parks and Recreation). That middle section involving him and Kathryn Hahn was where the film got the laughs out of me, and in a way they were kinda like a polar opposite parallel to Randy Quaid and Miriam Flynn's characters in National Lampoon's Vacation.

      Obviously, there’s no doubt the film was trying to recapture the magic of National Lampoon’s Vacation. That film, though, had a legendary trifecta of the late John Hughes’s writing, Harold Ramis’s direction and Chevy Chase in the lead role. If this film focused just on the four posing as a family instead of throwing the obligatory drug dealers in there for the sake of having some token action moments (the big weakness of Identity Thief, by the way), maybe it could’ve been better. What we end up getting is just a weak story that is too predictable and ultimately forgettable. I don’t mind predictability in a comedy if you’re still gonna deliver the laughs (see my review of The Heat). It has its moments and certainly has more than a lot of the far worse comedies we've seen this year. More often than not though the jokes fall flat, and when they're good it's not enough to save the film. I give We’re the Millers a C- (★★).