Some things in American culture are easier to make fun of than to make funny. Take the recreational vehicle. If history has taught us anything, it’s that there’s virtually zero chance a film’s going to prove the laughfest you’d like if it makes prominent comic use of an RV.
Exhibit A: RV (2006). The low point in the careers of both Barry Sonnenfeld (Wild Wild West) and Robin Williams. If you’ve seen Flubber (1997), Death to Smoochy (2002) or Old Dogs (2009), you can appreciate the level of awfulness I’m suggesting. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
The Winnebago, like its gas-guzzlin’ cousins, is such a big, goofy, quintessentially American contraption you’d figure using it to produce humor would be a piece of cake. It’s the Barcalounger of big wheelers. And yet the finest minds in Hollywood have failed, time after time, to successfully milk it for movie yuks.
Jay Roach, for example, can make anything from a secret agent with poor dental hygiene (Austin Powers) to a wrestling match between naked dudes (Borat) funny but he couldn’t eek a chuckle out of scenes Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro shared in a motor home owned by the father-in-law from hell; Meet the Fockers was stuck in snooze control. Mel Brooks gave us a spaceship in the shape of an RV for Spaceballs but the gag went nowhere at warp speed and the combined efforts of Alexander Payne (Sideways) and Jack Nicholson couldn’t justify a ride-along on the protagonist’s cross country odyssey in the 35 footer featured in About Schmidt.
So it does not exactly shock that the latest attempt to wring entertainment from this comic vehicle is all over the road tonally, not to mention skimpy on guffaws per gallon. Did we really expect Rawson Marshall Thurber (Dodgeball) to put his stamp on modern comedy?
You’ve seen the ads: Jason Sudeikis plays Dave, a small time Denver pot dealer who’s forced by his boss (Ed Helms) to transport tons of product across the Mexican border in a motor home (the Newmar Dutch Star). Promising a cut of the take, he recruits a motley collection of acquaintances to pose as his all American family hoping to minimize guard suspicion.
There’s Sudeikis’ Horrible Bosses costar, Jennifer Aniston, as a stripper who accepts his proposal to play his wife in exchange for a payday. Will Poulter and Emma Roberts-a latchkey dork and potty mouth street punk respectively-clean up to come along as his make believe brood. When you’re not marveling at how much more fun the two leads were in Horrible Bosses, you’re likely to be scratching your head over the film’s seriously split personality.
The picture’s committee of writers clearly couldn’t decide whether it wanted to go for R-rated raunch or heart-tugging sentimentality so opted for both. The first half of the film mocks family values and conventions. The second is all about the fake clan bonding for real and longing improbably to embrace the Cleaver lifestyle.
Along the way, neither the motor home nor the movie take an unpredictable turn. We’re the Millers is not without flashes of inspiration or the occasional laugh out loud moment (think National Lampoon’s Vacation with male frontal nudity), but they’re detours. Any envelope pushing takes a back seat to bathos, to the fake family’s journey to the land of warm and fuzzy fakeness and feel-good final acts rarely get faker than this one.
Certainties are few in this life but you can take it from me: Though the movie listings might suggest otherwise, there’s no such thing as Miller time.
Good review Rick. Pretty funny flick, even if it isn’t hilarious I’d say. Just funny enough to warrant a rental of some sorts.