Movie Review: We're The Millers

Pot boiler

Comedy. MA15+

What’s It All About? A mismatched quartet pretend to be a clean cut RV holidaying family to sneak a massive drug haul over the Mexican border.

The Verdict: Watch the trailer and you’ve seen the best bits.

2.0/5.0

Imagine if the National Lampoon’s Vacation franchise were rebooted with a semi-subversive edge with the crass factor ramped up to eleven. Subtract much of that series’ lovable bumbling humour and you have a rough idea of how this comedy has turned out. The Millers ain’t the Griswolds.

"With plenty of gross out humour, profanity and ample hard-bodied Aniston flesh on display it’s pretty clear who the target market is – teenage boys."

When down-on-his-luck pot dealer David (Jason Sudeikis, Horrible Bosses) is forced to courier a massive marijuana haul by the surprisingly corporate drug king pin Brad (Ed Helms, The Hangover series, who incidentally is attached to a planned actual Vacation reboot) he comes up with the brainwave to pose as a clean-cut family on vacation to Mexico to escape detection.

Not the Griswolds

He recruits stripper Rose (Jennifer Aniston), dorky Kenny (Brit Will Poulter, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader) and tearaway Casey (Emma Roberts, Celeste & Jesse Forever) as his fake wife and kids and after a clean-cut makeover for all it’s all aboard a jet plane to pick up an RV haul of weed. Predictably things don’t go to plan, there’s an aggrieved Mexican drug lord (Tomer Sisley, Largo Winch) and a saucy down-home family of RV enthusiasts (Parks & Recreation's Nick Offerman and Kathryn Hahn) to deal with.

Spot the joke

With plenty of gross out humour (men, gird your loins for there's a There’s Something About Mary moment) profanity and ample hard-bodied Aniston flesh on display it’s pretty clear who director Rawson Marshall Thurber (Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story) is targeting – the swarms of teenage boys who supposedly make up the holy grail of Hollywood’s majority movie-going audience.

There’s nothing wrong with crude but it does help to have some genuine wit-laced humour behind it but apart from a handful of genuine laughs and a few clever lines in a lazily crass script from the writers of Wedding Crashers and Hot Tub Time Machine, that’s in short supply. And a fairly late lurch into saccharine-sweet territory does the film no favours.

Jen knew a fart-related catastrophe when she saw one

Sudeikis and Aniston – who have appeared together in The Bounty Hunter and Horrible Bosses and will team up for that film’s sequel - can both be strong comic leads but in this fairly stale screenplay they don’t have a lot to work with. Aniston has some fun with her stripper meets down-home mom role but Sudeikis’ character is mostly unlikable. Their reported improvs don’t amount to much.

The film had reportedly spent almost ten years in development wilderness with the likes of Steve Buscemi, Will Arnett and Jason Bateman attached as the lead with The Full Monty director Peter Cattaneo set to direct at one stage. You wonder what We’re The Millers might have been but as it stands it’s a poor indictment on a film when its best scenes can be found in the trailer and blooper reel. 

For some quality screwball family holiday cinema, revisit the original National Lampoon’s Vacation instead.