Directed by: Rawson Marshall Thurber
Starring: Jason Sudeikis, Jennifer Aniston, Will Poulter, Emma Roberts
Rated R, 110 minutes
Jason Sudeiki (Courtesy photos)
Jennifer Aniston
Will Poulter
Emma Roberts
Even more bizarre than the premise of “We’re the Millers,” the tale of a group of formerly unacquainted loners becoming a makeshift family in order to help “Dad” smuggle drugs across the Mexican border, is the weirdness of the casting. Featuring an incongruous group of actors who mostly do TV shows all acting against type in a pseudo-family road trip comedy is an odd sight. Weirder still, it works.
Jason Sudeikis (“Saturday Night Live”) plays small-time drug dealer David Clark, a Denver pothead living the boring bachelor life. When he gets mugged and robbed of all his money, he suddenly finds himself short several thousand dollars that he owes to a smarmy druglord. The druglord agrees to let David off the hook – if he goes to Mexico to bring back a shipment of marijuana. David agrees, and gathers together a fake family so that they can pose as tourists and avoid suspicions from border guards. But his family is a troublesome lot, including the testy stripper Rose O’Reilly (Jennifer Aniston, “Friends”), the naïve dork Kenny Rossmore (Will Poulter, “Son of Rambow”), and the belligerent runaway Casey Mathis (Emma Roberts, “Aquamarine”). It’s an uphill battle just to keep a low profile as the “Millers” travel down to the border.
The situation becomes dire when they arrive to pick up the drugs and realize that the shipment is far bigger than they were expecting. To make matters worse, an aggravatingly wholesome family of tourists ends up traveling alongside the Millers for a good portion of their journey, threatening constantly to expose them as smugglers. And if that wasn’t enough, a rival druglord learns of their cargo and starts tailing them. All while the Millers deal with their own problems, ranging from failed relationships to intimacy issues to the loneliness in their real lives.
It’s a predictable story, to be sure. I walked into the theater knowing—expecting, really—that the Millers would end up realizing their familial love towards one another by the end. But the script, written by the same guys who wrote “Wedding Crashers,” isn’t predictable in how it reaches that conclusion, using clever jokes of all shapes and sizes (most sexual in some way or another) to approach something looking like closure. To Rawson Marshall Thurber’s (“Dodgeball”) credit, even when the film lapses into potentially cheesy territory, it does so with tongue-in-cheek sarcasm. This is a movie that would be killed by sentimentality, but would be vacuous without it; Thurber finds a proper place in between, using indifference and rudeness to convey a warped sense of love.
And so it is that we love the characters—in a warped way. Sudeikis’s David is hapless and obsessed with self-preservation, but likable nonetheless, while Aniston’s Rose is surprisingly matronly under her misanthropic and seedy exterior. Emma Roberts might not be the most exciting actress, and Casey’s contributions to the movie are thanks more to the writing than to her performance, but there is something to be said for her utter nonchalance as she sheds her goody-goody Nickelodeon reputation in favor of an R-rated alter ego. But the real star of the movie is Will Poulter, a wild card among established American celebrities, as the woefully oblivious Kenny. He steals every scene and, thankfully, gets an adequate amount of screen time to show us that he is capable of great comedic timing in an assortment of situations.
Thurber’s best move, though, might be the inclusion of a blooper reel at the end of the movie. Gimmicky as that may sound, and problematic as it might be to see the actors being themselves instead of being their characters, there is a home video feel to it that leaves a good taste in your mouth. Up to the final moments of the movie, we’ve been taken on a fun ride with these characters, but it’s in this last little add-on, complete with inside jokes, that we realize that, behind a brazenly bitter façade, they were having fun too.
Danny Eisenberg is a 2010 graduate of the Bromfield School and is currently a student at the University of Pennsylvania.
