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By Bruce Dennill

Editor, pArticipate Arts & Culture magazine


It’s Miller time!

Let it be said upfront that this is a steadfastly average film, so knowingly silly that at one point its leading man, Jason Sudeikis, looks directly into the camera and raises an eyebrow.


The plot has played out in any number of similar projects, and the entirely expected gross-out moment includes a hugely swollen testicle.

Wait – come back. Despite all of this, We’re The Millers is a lot of fun, allowing for a chunk of time during which you can switch off and giggle like an idiot – an underrated pleasure.

Much of the film’s charm is down to Sudeikis (right), whose dope-pushing David Clark is a lazy nice guy waiting to break through an apathetic exterior. To pay back a debt to an eccentric drug baron (Ed Helms), Clark is forced to get involved in a once-off smuggling job that rips him out of his comfort zone. To help deflect attention from himself, he ropes in a fake family – slumming rebel Casey (Roberts), naive goofball Kenny (Will Poulter) and stripper neighbour Rose (Aniston) – before heading for Mexico in an enormous motor-home.

The narrative is driven by a number of scenes in which the most likely outcome is avoided at the last minute, often leaving the characters bemused. Nobody takes themselves seriously, and the fact that the story is peopled with caricatures is embraced and occasionally even highlighted (as when Clark refers to a goody two-shoes passer-by as “real-life Ned Flanders”, referring to the nerdy The Simpsons character).

 

 

The real journey, the scriptwriters will tell you, is not the round trip to south of the border, but the emotional development of the characters. Sweet, simple Kenny is the only likeable one to begin with, and the fact that the others are apparently comfortable with their boorishness actually makes the film more interesting for a while. Hollywood doesn’t allow that sort of thing for too long, though, and a disappointing ending takes most of the edge of what could otherwise be considered a sort of Hangover for families.

Sudeikis is growing in status as a standalone leading man, and We’re The Millers pushes him further down that road, without adding anything particularly fresh to the comedy template.

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