We're the Millers (2013)

For reasons I will never be able to explain, there is one sentence from Roger Ebert’s review of David Wain’s Role Models that continues to stick with me. He praises the film as “the kind of comedy where funny people say funny things in funny situations.” It’s not exactly a revelatory phrase, but it also speaks to just how simple our desires are when we sit down for a movie like Role Models or the new comedy We’re the Millers. Neither of these movies are out to surprise anyone on a plot level, and they follow their respective formulas almost too closely, but they are both really fun comedies that got a group of talented actors together and gave them humorous things to do. Everyone in the audience for We’re the Millers will know precisely where it’s going from the second they sit down, but their enjoyment of each hilarious moment will likely drown out any problems they may have.

David Clark (Jason Sudeikis) is a drug dealer who lives a happily single life in his apartment until he is robbed by a group of street toughs, leaving him in serious debt. His supplier Brad (Ed Helms) gives him an offer: if he goes to Mexico and brings back some marijuana to distribute, then everything will be even. In order to get past border security, David decides to rent an RV and put together a fake family for the trip. He recruits his stripper neighbor Rose (Jennifer Aniston) to be his wife, the nerdy teenager who lives below him (Will Poulter) to be his son, and the neighborhood homeless girl (Emma Roberts) to be his daughter. Together they dress up as a happy, wholesome American family and set off for Mexico.

The movie gets off to a rough start, though the need for at least some exposition makes that inevitable. (There’s also the fact that it opens with a series of random YouTube videos for no reason, which, what?) As the premise is being established, it feels like work. Once all the characters are dressed up and playing their respective roles in the family, then the fun really starts. The second act of this movie is easily the strongest, as it moves from gag to gag to gag without wasting much time. On top of that, the gags are usually really funny. The interactions between Sudeikis, Aniston, Roberts and Poulter are always great, and the movie gets an extra boost when Nick Offerman and Kathryn Hahn show up as a nice midwestern couple in the midst of their own vacation. No one is acting out of their comfort zone here, but that becomes an asset to the film more than anything. The performers are free to be as funny as they want, and the film accomplishes that without falling into shapeless sequences of improvisation. For most of its running time, We’re the Millers has one thing that not many comedies these days can claim to have: forward momentum.

That disappears a bit in the final act, as the movie drags on just a bit longer than it needs to. It also has to deal with the plot and character arcs, which all get their own super obvious conclusions, and not many of them are all that convincing. It’s particularly hard to buy Sudeikis’ required change of heart at the end of the movie, as before that his performance and character seemed to have only one gear, albeit an amusing one. We’re the Millers is a comedy that is too normal to be great, but too funny from moment to moment to be dismissed. It’s standard stuff, but it’s standard stuff executed at a surprisingly high level.

Grade: B+