There’s no secret to the comedy in We’re the Millers, it’s pretty low-brow and it’s not exactly well constructed. The development of the narrative is sloppy and for all intents and purposes it’s a film filled with “trailer moments” as it’s more interested in delivering comedy that shocks rather than developing a series of punchlines and running gags. There’s no problem with this, and there are plenty of laughs, but the laziness in nearly all aspects of the film’s creation are glaringly obvious and once you round the final turn it falls to melodramatic pieces.
A drug dealer (Jason Sudeikis) has his stash stolen and is beholden to his boss (Ed Helms) for a lot of money, but he’s given an out (of sorts) when he’s told he must go to Mexico to pick up a load of marijuana and smuggle it back into the States. Without much of a choice he agrees and enlists a stripper (Jennifer Aniston), a runaway (Emma Roberts) and his abandoned next door neighbor (Will Poulter) to join him on his journey where they’ll pose as the all American family in an effort to skirt the law at the border and return home safely. Easy enough, right? So why doesn’t the plot stop there?
We’re the Millers is yet another comedy that wants to be all things to all people, but the raunchy, R-rated aspect of most of the humor will prevent it from appealing to anyone outside that demographic, which means the other junk thrown in to appeal to an audience that will never see it diminishes the overall appeal for no reason.
I laughed numerous times throughout while at the same time recognizing the multitude of flaws, many of which signaling this is a throwaway comedy rather and nothing more. Fortunately there’s room for movies of all shapes and sizes, but there isn’t room for this movie’s third act melodrama as it ceases to be a piece of entertainment and tries to drum up a story of redemption and family out of thin air.
At what point does a film about a drug dealer turned international smuggler with his fake, stripper wife become a film with any sense of morality? The first two-thirds of this film center around dick jokes, mistaken incest, pot babies run over by semi trucks, orgies and spider-bitten testicles. However, you slowly see something else creep in as director Rawson Marshall Thurber and his team of four screenwriters (Bob Fisher, Steve Faber, Sean Anders and John Morris) begin dropping a multitude of not-so-subtle hints that the comedy will soon stop and some seriousness will take hold. Because if there’s one thing a film about a fake family smuggling some drugs into the country needs, it’s sentimentality.
The hack nature of the narrative is evident early and often, but none so much as the introduction of the film’s secondary villain. The marijuana Sudeikis is asked to bring back to the States actually belongs to a Mexican drug lord played by Tomer Sisley whose introduction may be one of the laziest I’ve seen in years. In what must be only two minutes of screen time, this guy pulls up in his sports car, says, “Where’s my drugs?” is told they aren’t there, gets back in his car and heads out to intercept the Millers… and scene. Now we have our villain. Granted, there are times where simplicity outweighs exposition, but this instance served as proof of how little thought actually went into the actual story being told compared to the next punchline.
Each scene plays like a “Saturday Night Live” sketch with attention to cohesive narrative storytelling a distant second to raunchy one-liners and unearned sentimentality. I could appreciate this on a purely primal level if you cut the melodrama and let the film exist as a means to spew out R-rated punchlines, but to ask me to care about these characters on a human level is asking too much and, quite frankly, insulting.
We’re the Millers is a film to wait for on DVD, Blu-ray and HBO. It’s not a bad comedy per se, but just makes a series of bad narrative decisions out of some sense of morality, or whatever it is that causes studio filmmakers to wedge some level of seriousness into wholly un-serious productions.
