Bet Your Life: THE HOUSE

We are at what one can only hope is the straggling tail end of the R-rated bad behavior comedy. The subgenre with such depressingly monotonous recent entries as Office Christmas Party, Fist Fight, and Snatched has become so predictable – shaggy improv roundabouts punctuated by truly nasty sight gags and corrosive worldviews wedded to extremely cynical sentimental self-actualization character arcs – that each new entry makes the days of Superbad or even Sisters seem so very far away. How often must we sit through the montages of consequence-free partying and destruction? This context might lead many to see what screenwriter Andrew Jay Cohen (of the more palatable Neighbors and Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates) is up to with The House, his directorial debut, as just another version of the same. But this brisk comedy about an in-over-their-heads middle-aged middle-class couple running an illegal small-town underground casino is doing something different, giving its raunchy ridiculousness a chance to escalate in concert with performers interested in doing more than cranking it up to eleven at the first chance. Sure, the movie has four-letter words, scenes of crowds drinking and fighting, and the requisite gross-out gags, but there’s a desperation to the characters’ energy, and a sharp societal commentary running through it. 

The trouble starts when a sweet married couple (Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler) faces down their impending empty nest with creeping terror. They don’t have enough money. Their daughter (Ryan Simpkins) is off to college, but, unknown to her, the scholarship they were counting on has fallen through. The folks vow to send her off right, and not break the bank on their shaky mortgage, despite weak-kneed moments. We’ve done everything right, Ferrell wails, confronted with his retirement account nonetheless turning up lighter than he’d thought (his 401k, for example, is several hundred thousand less than his assumption that it was an account with $401k in it) and the first bills for tuition rolling in. Enter their lovably sleazy friend (Jason Mantzoukas, stepping up to co-lead status after years of choice bit parts), a desperate divorced mope in need of financial pick-me-up himself, who proposes the off-the-books, under-the-table casino concept. Make four years of tuition in just a month off the backs of their craven neighbors’ gambling urges! It seems so simple at the start, but the movie smartly allows it to spiral out of control in logically wild ways, tying its economic anxiety and middle-class collapse to their tunnel-vision greed. Its thesis very well might be “capitalism: the cause of and solution to your problems.” By the time the couple have become kingpins of the backyard bacchanalia, equal parts pleasure and guilt, it’s clear that money may be a necessary evil. They lose track of their original goal as they plunge deeper into selfishness (a trait mirrored by the town’s equally crooked council members). 

I’m afraid that might make the movie sound like a screed, or a grating political commentary. No, what’s some sort of genius is the way this all follows from a blast of a comedy, springing up naturally from heightened absurdity rooted in character and situation. It’s hilarious moment to moment, its underlying thematic preoccupations carried off with the lightest of touches because it’s too busy with bouncy quips, brisk sight gags, unexpected line-readings, and a convincingly centered escalation. Ferrell and Poehler play the rare comedy married couple who are given equal billing and equal footing in the shenanigans. Driven by the desire to do right by their daughter and continue the illusion of financial security for their family, they are in complete lockstep, a perfect team. No time for phony divisions or false relationship crises. They’re too busy slowly but surely turning into slick suburban mobsters, self-styled untouchable underground small business owners. All the while they remain adorably committed to each other and to their plan, building each other up and egging each other on. Ferrell and Poehler have the relaxed manic energy of an old relationship enlivened by an exciting new project, a chemistry that feels real and true and sells the insanity to come.

What starts as neighbors around a poker table balloons into fight night, bars, DJs, pool service and more as an honest-to-goodness casino-in-miniature opens up like a dazzling Hellmouth under their cul-de-sac. Surrounded by a stellar supporting cast (a veritable who’s-who of comic character actors, including Nick Kroll, Rob Huebel, Lennon Parham, Cedric Yarbrough, Michaela Watkins, and more) who sell the good-natured raunch and escalating panic-inducing comic gross-outs. By the time sweet Ferrell has accidentally axed a low-level mobster’s finger off (and used a Croc in a flailing, futile attempt to stop the bleeding) and Poehler has fashioned a makeshift flamethrower to protect their investment, they’re not simply uproariously wild R-rated shocks, but a totally logical extension of the story’s good-natured cynicism. The lead characters are so sweet and loveable it’s worth a wild and wacky dive into the dark side to see them come face to face with their own greedy failings and rediscover what truly matters. 

It could have simply been pat family-first moralizing dressed up in goofy Breaking Bad-as-a-sitcom clothes, but the total commitment of its makers and leads elevate this into something special. The movie’s finale brings the strands together – family values colliding with small-town corruption in a mad-dash scramble to set things right. But it’s clear that just because this loveable family might be able to save themselves in the end, there remains something tenuous about the whole financial underpinnings of their world. It’s funny watching them flail – it’s the sort of comedy where it’s funny both cumulatively as obstacles pile up, and on a scene-by-scene basis as every glance, aside, and posture contributes to the pleasure – but there’s also a nervous laugh about how deeply messed up our culture’s financial priorities are. Turns out a casino economy is enough to drive a person crazy. The movie is an appealingly outlandish nervous tap-dance over the yawning chasm of distress that is modern America, an escalating desperation in the face of financial despair.

Wedding Smashers: MIKE & DAVE NEED WEDDING DATES

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is one of those movies with a title that tells you just about all you need to know about its plot. Mike and Dave need dates to their sister’s wedding. It’s their father’s ultimatum. You see, these rowdy brothers have made it a habit of bringing their hard-partying frat-boy lifestyle to family gatherings, which have resulted in property damage, personal injury, and great embarrassment. Somehow this is pinned on their drive to impress the ladies, so mandatory dates it is. The act of finding two women to take an all-expenses-paid trip to a destination wedding at a Hawaiian resort has a cracked reality show vibe as Mike and Dave throw an ad up on Craigslist and watch the applications roll in as it goes viral. Played by the buff Zac Efron and the doughier Adam Devine, the guys are totally self-centered and incredibly privileged. The movie’s smartest move is to find them perfect foils in a pair of sloppy, silly con women (Anna Kendrick and Aubrey Plaza) who decide to play classy and bilk themselves a vacation.

The result is a reasonably diverting gender flip on the Wedding Crashers idea, with Kendrick and Plaza running away with the entire film out from under its ostensible stars. So what if the movie’s named after and rooting for Mike and Dave? This should be Alice and Tatiana’s story. They’re freshly fired waitresses who rouse themselves from a snack food and daytime television enabled stupor to wash up, put on nice dresses, and pretend to be the sort of girls the guys would love to show off to their wealthy family. They force a Meet Cute and, bada-bing bada-boom, they’re off to Hawaii. It’s not exactly a sophisticated con they’re running. One claims to be a schoolteacher (“I’m always noticing spellings…” she coos) who loves her students despite, “how dumb they are,” while the other says she manages a hedge fund, describing her daily office life as a matter of checking on the hedging. The appeal of the movie rests entirely on their rowdy free-spiritedness, and in the performances of Kendrick and Plaza. Refreshingly casual and candid, they drip with sarcasm and filthy improvisational patter.

For a stretch in the middle – as the family (including sister Sugar Lyn Beard and father Stephen Root) are convinced they like these fun-loving frauds while the boys’ emotional stability is slowly undermined – there’s enjoyment to be had in the rowdy vulgarity. Kendrick and Plaza are funny as their characters are unable to hold onto their “good girl” facades because it’s too much fun just being themselves, doing ATV tricks, slamming back shots, ordering room service, and slipping extra bills in a masseuse's pocket to make sure the bride-to-be has an extra special session. But too often the script by Neighbors’ Andrew Jay Cohen and Brendan O’Brien falls back on the usual tricks of the subgenre: drug trips, surprise nudity, long punchline roulettes in which the cast stands around tossing out improvised insults. And as its plot gears start grinding to a treacly conclusion it asks us to care about the interminably dopey guys as well. Efron earns some sympathy, showing a capacity for mellowing and meeting his responsibilities halfway. But Devine can’t come down from the self-centered stubbornness, which drives him to entitled fits. The movie’s supposed to end with people learning lessons, but it’s more about forgetting than forgiving.

This isn’t an entirely successful movie. The setup is great, but deserves more of a farcical verve to stir things up. The side characters (a good cast of cable-TV character actors, including Veep’s Sam Richardson, Breaking Bad’s Lavell Crawford, and Silicon Valley’s Alice Wetterlund and Kumail Nanjiani) stay rather one-note. The mishaps never really cascade or escalate in the best door-slamming misunderstandings tradition, because consequences are dropped to get to the next sequence. A face run over in a freak accident has bruising for a jokey reveal, then quickly fades. An encounter in a steam room between a game Plaza and a seductive cousin-of-the-bride is used for shock value, but has no satisfying payoff. The movie excuses its characters’ behaviors when convenient, or holds it over their heads’ when needed. It’s all at the whims of the predictable plot beats instead of snowballing organically, and thus can’t quite make the turns from R-rated frankness to sweet sentimentality it tries. The balance of sweetness and sourness is off. But even though the thing doesn’t cohere as well as it should, director Jake Szymanski keeps the pace moving, the tone relaxed, and the jokes just above the insult-to-intelligence line. Plus, he knows how to step back and allow Kendrick and Plaza to run circles around Efron and Devine. As a lazy summer distraction, that might be good enough.

Block Party: NEIGHBORS 2: SORORITY RISING

Like so many comedy sequels, Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising is little more than a belabored reason to repeat the first movie’s basic structure and gags, with a lower joke success rate and a sparser humor density. At least in this case the “little more” is interesting. So it’s not nothing, but still quite a bit less enjoyable than the broad, bawdy, and surprisingly thoughtful sight-gag heavy original. It found a frat house (led by Zac Efron) moving in next door to a married couple (Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen) and their baby. This was, of course, an acrimonious situation, generational discomfort agitated into a prank war as the parents sad to see their youth slipping away desperately attempted to get the frat bros evicted. By the end they’d reach some understanding, the bros and the adults going to their separate ways supposedly wiser for the experience. Not so, it turns out, as a sorority moves into the now-empty frat and the cycle starts all over again.

Getting a sorority involved is the movie’s cleverest idea. It allows for an exploration of gendered double standards, explicitly asking if the wild behavior and mean-spirited pranks the girls get up to over the course of the story would be considered quite so extreme if it were done by guys. It’s also a sharp elbow in the side of campus culture, bringing up the totally true rule that sororities aren’t allowed to throw parties. This is why a group of misfit freshmen girls (Chloë Grace Moretz, Kiersey Clemons, and Beanie Feldstein, funny, if somehow underused in their own movie) decide to start up their own off-campus sorority, throwing a bunch of parties with cover charges to pay for rent. It’s empowering after a fashion, a sloppy animal house for the young ladies. Girls can have a dumb raunchy college comedy, too, you know. But, alas, that’s where the movie’s inspiration ends.

That freshness is tied to a retread of its returning characters’ emotional arcs. Why not find something new for Rogen and Byrne to do instead of simply worry about the effect of the out-of-control college kids next door again? Wouldn’t it be funny if they tried a different approach? The stakes are ratcheted up from the last time. Now they’ve bought a new house, are close to closing a deal selling their current one, and are afraid the girls will sink the escrow, leaving them with no choice but to go bankrupt. That’s ominous. But their response is to engage in the exact sort of behavior that got them in over their heads last time. Once more they’re torn about their out-of-touch status and fretting about being good parents while roping in old friends (like Ike Barinholtz) to terrorize the sorority and kicking off another prank war. You’d think they’d know better by now. The new idea they try is a contortion to get Efron back in the mix, this time working with them to help combat the youngsters. This is also the point where you realize age is coming for us all, and recent teen star Efron is closer in age to Rogen than to Moretz. Time marches on and whatnot.

The screenplay cobbled together by director Nicholas Stoller, Rogen and writing partner Evan Goldberg, with co-writers Andrew Jay Cohen and Brendan O’Brien takes narrative shortcuts to get to jokes and setpieces. Then, once there, it’s not really worth the time. There’s a lengthy sequence set at a tailgate that’s just misjudged and tedious. The parties aren’t as fun or chaotic as the first film’s; nor are the relationships between the sorority sisters sketched out as clearly as the frat bros’. That’s not to say there aren’t funny developments – a handful of Minions-inspired cutaway jokes are almost reason enough to have made the movie – but the lengths to which it goes to generate less of an effect than before is a little dispiriting. So much falls flat and so little seems to be telling a focused story or expressing coherent behavior that it’s just sitting there on screen.

Yet as far as disappointing and unnecessary sequels go, this one’s not actively harmful, just a bit of a drag. The performers have a lot of energy – more than the plot, jokes, and filmmaking know what to do with – and the whole thing has a nice low-key progressive bent. It’s not straining to be open-minded. It just is. There’s a sharp, if occasionally muddled, understanding of what it means to be a woman on a college campus and the sexist lenses with which society at large views them. (Blame the few cheaper moments – like weeping en masse to a sad movie – on the total lack of women in the writer’s room, I suppose.) And there’s something to its casual, natural acceptance. An early scene finds a gay couple’s engagement joyously celebrated by their former frat bros who jump up and down chanting “U.S.A.” That’s a patriotic image in my book. Would that all these good intentions turn the lackluster film around them into something worth the watch.