WE'RE THE MILLERS

year: 2013 cast: Jason Sedeikis, Jennifer Aniston, Emma Roberts, Will Poulter, Ed Helms rating: *1/2

The gimmick is that a low-rent drug dealer has to really stretch himself, posing as a young happy-go-lucky father with two kids and a wife in order to be a “mule,” someone who takes a load of drugs (in this case, marijuana) from Mexico back across the border. And the first of many problems is that Jason Sudeikis as David, with shaggy hair and a five o’clock shadow, never seemed that rebellious in the first place for the transition to really matter.

The bogus family consists of his stripper neighbor Rose. Jennifer Aniston plays a sexy wild card with a contented personality no different from the good girls in her other movies, and that popular TV show. The two kids are just as unbalanced and unfunny; the sexy daughter’s a homeless teen with an iphone and the boy, played by Will Poulter, is the "comic relief in a comedy film" character all the physical humor, like getting bitten by a tarantula and learning how to kiss a girl, relies on.

The surface of WE’RE THE MILLERS is liken to any of the VACATION films, but with a supposed edge. After all we’re dealing with lowlifes stuck in a dire situation, especially after successfully crossing the border only to be hunted by a Mexican drug lord resembling a swarthy magazine model.

You might think this sounds like more of an adventure than comedy, but even that potential is wasted on two prolonged scenes… one involving our heroes awkwardly clashing with a nerdy conservative couple at a campground, and then being stranded at a fairgrounds, which just happens to be connected to an emergency room hospital. For a road movie there's simply not enough geography covered to make the trip very interesting.

Sedeikis tries really hard to seem like he's not trying at all, wielding the popular brand of sarcasm where if you repeat the pandemonium around you, it’s just as funny, if not funnier, than the situation itself… and yet he comes off as one-dimensionally rude and mean-spirited, which might fit, say, a no-holds-barred HANGOVER style comedy (his doppelganger Ed Helms plays a snarky drug dealer), but with a cliché rom-com baseline beneath the forced blue humor, he’s all dressed up with nowhere to go.