Director: Rawson Marshall Thurber

Cast: Jennifer Aniston, Jason Sudeikis, Emma Roberts, Will Poulter, Ed Helms, Nick Offerman, Kathryn Hahn, Molly C. Quinn, Tomer Sisley, Matthew Willig, Luis Guzman.

Screenplay: Bob Fisher, Steve Faber, Sean Anders, John Morris.

110 mins. Rated R for crude sexual content, pervasive language, drug material and brief graphic nudity.

We’re the Millers, Rawson Marshall Thurber’s newest release, finds an interesting concept with a broken wing, unable to fly as high as it should. We have a solid cast and a great plot, a perversion on the classic family road trip movie, but many of the jokes do not land as nicely as hoped.

The story follows David Clark, a small-time drug dealer played by Jason Sudeikis (Horrible Bosses, Drinking Buddies) who finds himself in debt to his supplier Brad Gurdlinger (Ed Helms, The Hangover, TV’s The Office) and must smuggle a “smidge” of drugs across the border from Mexico to the U.S.A. in order to alleviate his troubles. So what does he do? He enlists a stripper (Jennifer Aniston, Wanderlust, TV’s Friends), a runaway (Emma Roberts, Aquamarine, American Horror Story: Coven), and a virgin who lives next door (Will Poulter, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader) and turns them into his fake family to look less conspicuous among the border-crossers. The idea sounds pretty good, right? The execution is where the film suffers. None of the jokes really come from the situation. Rather, the characters are written into ever-more-silly situations and the jokes spring up from that rather than pining the source plot for more hilarity.

The acting isn’t bad from anyone; far from it, the characters are all ably-performed. We get some good laughs from Nick Offerman and Kathryn Hahn, who play husband and wife RV-travelers Don and Edie Fitzgerald. The laughs in the movie are funny, true, but without any connection to the plot-line, the story unravels fairly quickly in the 3rd act, leading to a lackluster climax and a predictable denouement.

This is a movie worth a viewing, yes, but it doesn’t have the lasting effect that I hoped for. There’s just too much goofiness to it which deters the viewers attention. Have a laugh, rent it, save some money.

3/5

-Kyle A. Goethe