Hall Pass (Review)

Hall Pass isn’t so much a single movie as it is several different movies thrown into a small arena and engaging in gladiatorial combat. Some of these movies are quite good, while others can be excessively crude and come off as unpleasant. Hall Pass works best when it makes an attempt at Apatowian dialogue-driven comedy, but it is less effective when it goes the more sophomoric route. There’s even a sequence during the end credits which teases an entirely different, darker movie that could have been magnificent. There are a handful of high points, but far too many lows to ignore.

The film begins by introducing us to Rick, played by Owen Wilson. He’s a family man whose marriage to Jenna Fischer has lost its spark of late, and as such his eye has begun to wander to other women, even though he has no real interest in sleeping with them. His best friend Fred (SNL’s Jason Sudeikis) is even more obsessed with sex, despite the fact he’s married to Christina Applegate. After a few incidents too many, their wives issue them a “hall pass,” which gives them one week off from the constraints of marriage. This concept is defined for us many times, as no one in the film has heard of it either. The term is first introduced to us by Joy Behar, doing her first film work since 1996.

As Rick, Fred and their gaggle of buddies head out on the town, it’s hard to ignore the similarities between this film and Judd Apatow’s terrific The 40-Year-Old Virgin. At first, it seems that they will find any excuse to not hook up with random women, and often when they do get the chance their loyalty to their wives tends to get in the way. Like Virgin, it tells the story of men forced into an environment they are unfamiliar with: the dating scene.

Hall Pass is as episodic as films get, and that only makes the inconsistencies more conspicuous. The film has many scenes which are genuinely hilarious, but the next sequence of events can tend to fall terribly flat. The film works best when it simply features a couple characters talking to each other, and it doesn’t work nearly as well when it goes for the more disgusting humor. Sometimes the film and I were on the same wavelength, but there were too many instances where it left a bad taste in my mouth.

One can’t be too surprised by the scatological humor, I suppose. Hall Pass is the latest film from the Farrelly brothers, two men who have made a career out of such boorish humor. Their past films have included Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary, but for one reason or another the gross stuff felt more at home in those films. Strange as it may sound, Hall Pass often comes off as a smarter comedy than it likely is, and for that reason when they throw in stuff like graphic male nudity it seems to come out of nowhere. You knew it was an R-rated comedy, but it never seemed like that kind of comedy.

The film’s greatest strength is its cast, featuring two likable performances from Wilson and Sudeikis as our sex-seeking heroes. Meanwhile, though they aren’t given a whole lot to do, Fischer and Applegate are quite engaging as their wives. Instead of being shrill, these characters are more worried about saving their marriage than blowing it up. These performances hint at something relatively interesting, but too many times they are sabotaged by an unwelcome vomit/poop joke.

Hall Pass could have been a much better movie than it is, and to a degree it can best be described as disappointing. There’s not an unlikable person at work here, but there are too many conflicting ingredients for it to become an effective whole. This is a film stuck in adolescence: it wants so badly to be treated like an adult, but it can’t quite bring itself to behave like one.

Rating:  (out of 4)