We're the Millers

The story of four anti-social people who, in desperate need of cash, agree to pose as a Griswold-esque family of tourists in order to smuggle marijuana across the Mexican border. The film aspires to be an entertainingly crass road movie, but after a tight first act, it falls apart, mostly because the main characters achieve their objective too quickly and easily. After only twenty-five minutes, they've safely escaped Mexico, and the film loses all narrative tension. Director Rawson Marshall Thurber and the four writers do their best to raise the stakes and create credible reasons for the characters to stay together for the rest of the picture, but their efforts feel too labored and phony to elicit big laughs. To make matters worse, they render the third act so tame and conventional that the film loses any edge it had to begin with. I don't understand why contemporary filmmakers seem to inevitably turn movies like these, which are aimed at the highly raunch-tolerant 18-to-24-year-old male demographic, into soft, PG-rated schmaltz-fests, but it happens all too often. The strong cast and the few memorably funny sequences fail to carry this disappointing comedy, which even ends with a lame Burt Reynolds/Dom DeLuise-style out-take reel that only further emphasizes how flimsy the jokes are.