We're the Millers - 2013

"We're the Millers" - 2013
Dir. by Rawson Marshall Thurber - 1 hr. 50 min.

Official Red Band Trailer #2

by Clayton Hollifield

Sometimes, all I want is a dirty comedy that's halfway as funny as the concept initially sounds, to blow a couple of hours laughing, to distract me from whatever I need distracting from.  "We're the Millers" is a movie that I had intended to catch in the theatres when it came around, it seemed like a good bet to deliver what I wanted out of it.  Both Jennifer Aniston and Jason Sudeikis have been good in these kinds of movies (like "Horrible Bosses," for instance), and the idea of a bunch of scumbags dressing up like dorks to pull off some serious felonious crime is solid enough.  I mean, you know that main characters are scumbags, and no matter how hard they try, they're not going to be able to completely fly under the radar.

David (Jason Sudeikis) is a low-level pot dealer in Denver, but a neighbor, Kenny (Will Pouter), decides to play hero for a street girl, Casey (Emma Roberts), which ends up with David getting beaten up and robbed of his supply and a significant amount of cash.  This leaves David with a problem: a lot of that money belonged to his boss, Brad (Ed Helms).  Brad proposes a solution; David can go down to Mexico and bring back a smidge and an a half of pot across the border.  For that, Brad will forgive the debt, plus pay David $100k.  David isn't down with that idea, but doesn't have a choice in the matter.  His plan, pretend to be a family of dorks on vacation in an RV, which will surely fly under everyone's radar.  David wrangles Casey and Kenny in on the plan, and has to convince a stripper that lives in his apartment building, Rose (Jennifer Aniston), to play his wife and take a little trip down to Mexico.

First up, the R-rating for "We're the Millers" is mostly due to language, and probably because there's a lot of drugs around in the movie (although no one seems to ever smoke any of mountains of weed that are laying around).  If you were hoping that it meant you were going to get to see Jennifer Aniston and her friends, you're out of luck (although she does have a nice strip-tease scene).  It's important to set your expectations at the right level.  This isn't really a gross-out comedy (like a Farrelly Bros movie), and there's not really any kind of hedonism on display, aside from a couple of scenes with another couple, played by Nick Offerman and Kathryn Hahn, which are funny mostly because of their tameness.  Much of the humor comes from how naturally the characters fall into their roles, as if the notion of an average American family is imprinted upon everyone, and slips on like a comfortable sweatshirt.  And there's a lot of sotto voce swearing, of course.

Really, the reason why this movie is pretty watchable and pretty funny is because there's a built-in structure (the need to move the RV from one place to another in an certain amount of time), and because the actors are good, and appropriate for their respective roles, and there's enough difference between them to allow for some natural friction.  And the actors involved generally do a good job.  There's a level of perverse fun in watching Jennifer Aniston be dirty after like a decade in sit-com land (and at an omnipresent amount of fame, as well) - there's a fantastic gag-reel bit in the credits involving the "Friends" theme song that had me laughing as hard as anything else in the movie.  Sudeikis probably isn't an asshole in real life, but he plays one well.  Nick Offerman and Kathryn Hahn are really good as the over-sharing couple that David and Rose can't seem to get away from.

Frequently, when I see a trailer for a comedy that seems like it's going to be okay, I end up being underwhelmed by the finished product.  The batting average seems even lower when we're talking about R-rated comedies.  Maybe people think that some swearing and maybe a flash of flesh is enough to justify $10 at the box office, but I don't usually leave the theatre feeling that way.  "We're the Millers" isn't a world-changing, all-time-great comedy, but it's at least as good as I thought it was going to be, and that's a victory in itself.

3 / 5 - TV (HD)

Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story - 2004

"Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story" - 2004
Dir. by Rawson Marshall Thurber - 1 hr. 32 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

For official record keeping purposes, the version I watched was the unrated Blu-Ray cut; I couldn't tell you what the difference between the versions is, and there's only one minute's difference in the run times listed at IMDB for the theatrical version and on the packaging for the unrated version.

I don't know exactly what makes up the difference between a pretty good comedy and a really good comedy, but there is a difference.  And whatever that difference is, it's what's missing from "Dodgeball."  But also, after saying that, I also know that I'm going to have to walk that assessment back a bit, because it makes the film sound a lot worse than I think it is.  But also, on re-watching "Dodgeball" for the first time in a few years, it wasn't quite as good as I'd remembered it being.

"Dodgeball" is a classic "save the house" film: Average Joe's gym is being foreclosed upon (to be turned into a parking structure for rival Globo-Gym.  Even though gym owner Peter LaFleur (Vince Vaughn) seems more than willing to go down without a fight, his core group of gym-goers are willing to follow him to any lengths to raise the $50k needed to pay off the debt.  They include Steve the Pirate (Alan Tudyk), high-school cheerleader wannabe Justin (Long), bespectacled mail-order bride owner Gordon (Stephen Root), the gym's trainer, Dwight (Chris Williams), and befuddled team manager Owen (Joel David Moore).  These men, along with bank employee Kate Veatch (Christine Taylor), end up entering a dodgeball tournament who's cash prize is coincidentally $50k.  Globo-Gym also enters a team of ringers, led by White Goodman (Ben Stiller), for the sole purpose of trying to personally deny the Average Joes the money they need.  Yes, it's an incredibly dickish move, but a lot of the fun in this film comes from Stiller's bizarre character, and this is par for the course.

So here's the point where I try to explain why I think this is only pretty good, and not really good.  It's a tough call, especially since there are at least a couple of really classic, great comedy scenes present.  Chief among those is a one-scene appearance by Lance Armstrong, with a devastating, self-aware, yet devoid of malice instant assessment of LaFleur's situation.  There's easily a handful of heavily-quoted scenes, as well.  Everyone knows, nobody makes me bleed my own blood.  Also, thank you, Chuck Norris.  There's great scenes, memorable lines, a good cast, outrageous characters, and a foul-mouthed old man (Rip Torn playing the team's coach, Patches O'Houlihan).  So why is this movie like a B-minus instead of a B-plus?

There are a few things that chip away at the overall film.  First off, I wasn't that impressed by Vince Vaughn this time around.  He's funny in the way he's frequently funny, but as this character was written, Peter LaFleur just doesn't care about what happens one way or another.  I get the notion of having a lead character with an ironic sense of ambivalence, and it makes for some funny exchanges.  At the same time, it's leaning too heavily on irony as the source of humor; if Peter doesn't care what happens, why would a viewer?  There are a few points that a "save the house" movie has to hit in order to add up at the end, and one of them is the character arc of rousing an ambivalent/slacker-ish character to action.  This movie is already playing within the confines of that formula, but misses the mark on that point.

The second thing that I found slightly less charming than I might have before is the overacting by ten or fifteen percent thing that's going on.  It makes sense with some of the more outlandish characters (particularly Stiller's, and he's fantastic at it), but it gets exhausting when everyone's doing it.  It's another symptom of leaning too heavily on irony to carry the comedic load; some of the characters don't have any solid footing.  I don't need an explanation for Steve the Pirate, it's better off unexplained.  But there are scenes to be found at various points featuring any of the characters mugging for the camera.  It's not overt enough to be obsequious, but there's a habit overplaying things for a beat in a really unsubtle way, and it makes me want to withhold my laughter so as not to reward the lack of directorial confidence in the material and actors.  The third thing, not big enough to warrant its own paragraph, is the debt that "Dodgeball" owes to "BASEketball."  It's not a big enough deal to call shenanigans on, and this is definitely the better (and vastly more successful) of the two films, but some of the gags (from the wacky, themed teams, to the sportscaster parodies, and even basing a film around a pseudo-sport) are retreads.  The borrowed ideas are put to good use, but it's worth mentioning.

But it's a pretty good movie.  I feel like I have to keep repeating that; I had some very specific qualms watching it this time around, but I still enjoyed it very much.  It's in the top tier of both Ben Stiller's and Vince Vaughn's comedies, but not quite at the same level as "Zoolander" or "Tropic Thunder."  But, after spending all that time splitting hairs, I'll end on a positive note.  My favorite scene in the whole movie, and the one guaranteed to make me laugh every time is a small response from Justin Long, when he randomly meets the cheerleader that he's got a crush on all the way in Las Vegas.  A male cheerleader shoos the girl away from Justin, and flips him the bird.  Justin's response is a baffled, quiet, "What?"  It's just one moment, but the response is perfect; both amazed and confused that a random meeting with this beautiful girl has so quickly turned into being thrown an obscene gesture.  The Lance Armstrong scene has legs, and there are great bits scattered all the way through "Dodgeball."  But that one little moment from Justin Long kills me every time.

3.5 / 5 - Blu-Ray