Too Many Crooks: HORRIBLE BOSSES 2

To say Horrible Bosses 2 represents everything wrong with America today is a bit of an overstatement, but more for what it implies about the mercifully forgettable movie’s importance than the actual repugnant experience of watching it unspool. Sure, it is a crassly commercial calculation pointlessly extending the plot of Horrible Bosses, a box office success that tidily concluded. There was no need to revisit the three dudes (Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, and Charlie Day) who hated their bosses so much they ended up causing the death of one, jail time for another, and blackmailed the third into silence. But the mere fact that we are is only unfortunate. What’s worst is the resulting R-rated comedy sequel’s ceaselessly miscalculated edginess. It takes the underlying selfish smugness that permeated its predecessor and amps it up while dialing down the sense of effort. It’s lazy and dumb, offensive mostly for what it assumes an audience will settle for.

The plot’s a shambles, a dull repetition of similar moments stupidly drug along by flat scenes that sit on the screen without building momentum or energy. It’s flat, barely feeling like a movie at all most of the time. The main guys have invented a new product that looked to me like any old showerhead, but they call it the Shower Buddy and claim inspiration from a car wash, so what do I know? Their product catches the attention of a big shot mail order magnate (Christoph Waltz) who orders thousands of units, then refuses payment, sending their fledgling business into bankruptcy. Then he laughs, saying he’ll buy their company from the bank for pennies on the dollar.

Too stupid to learn their lesson from the last film, as per comedy sequel dictates, they decide to kidnap the rich guy’s jerk son (Chris Pine) and demand their company as ransom. Once they do, the son tries to negotiate a cut of the ransom as his dad calls a detective (Jonathan Banks) and our main characters flail about in-over-their-heads panicking. Now that I type that out, it doesn’t sound so bad. And indeed, the core is fine, a sort of Ransom of Red Chief meets heist movie plot that could’ve worked well with a tight pace, good sense of character, and funny jokes. There’s none of that here.

Director Sean Anders, coming off the funniest Adam Sandler comedy of the past decade, having apparently made a wrong turn somewhere, deploys ugly, garishly bright digital cinematography that looks cheap and smudged. It’s hard to look at, though at least it matches the general sense of slapdash carelessness that permeates the whole project. The plot features few real surprises. The closest it gets involves a character literally shouting, “What a twist!” It spends its time weakly moving through a painfully stupid series of events, limply trotting out characters from the first film (Jennifer Aniston, Jamie Foxx, Kevin Spacey) with little reason for their reappearances beyond their prior appearances. The screenplay (credited to the director and three others) heightens their original quirks to mean-spirited parodies of what were already those to begin with.

But where the script most turns wrong is its unrelenting vileness. No character can go more than three lines without becoming problematic or gratingly tone-deaf. It’s an attempt to be edgy, filthily R, through nothing more than endlessly, wearingly, willingly offensive dialogue of the cheapest, meanest, lowest variety. It starts to pile up instantly: ethnic slurs, casual objectification of women, fear and appropriation of black culture, gay panic. With the flimsiest patina of ironic distance, the sleaziest of half-hearted excuses for such bottom-feeding comedy, the movie becomes shamelessly putrid: sexist, racist, and homophobic, a gross pit of worst impulses, a comments section come to life, dripping self-regard and overflowing with horrible worldviews.

Most anything can be funny approached from the right angles, but Horrible Bosses 2 finds only wrong ones. There are tasteless punchlines about molestation, mental illness, and abuse, ill-timed gags about henpecked men and police misconduct. And every scene includes at least one attempted comic riff about sexual assault, resulting in a movie that seems to exist mostly to catalog all possible variations of rape joke. The only laughs are in the bloopers that play over the end credits, but even then they’re mostly on screen, not off. In a year that brought us largely funny, cheerily dirty, broad R-rated comedies like Neighbors and 22 Jump Street (problematic prison scene aside) managing to be somewhat progressive in their approaches to race, gender, sexuality, and class, the Horrible Bosses weltanschauung feels all the more stunted and backwards. Yuck.

Not a Family Movie: WE'RE THE MILLERS

The runtime of We’re the Millers is listed as 110 minutes, but I don’t know what takes so long. It’s a fast-paced movie that’s all plot, dragging along gags and leaving the characters lagging behind. It’s a high concept comedy that leaps so quickly into its concept that we’ve barely met the characters before they’re already completely into the movie’s central scenario. I have no idea how this movie could’ve possibly filled up nearly two hours of screen time. It’s in a constant rush, terrified of downtime or a single thought beyond the overpowering demands of its plot mechanics, which are at once incredibly simple and yet somehow in constant need of further propulsion. The plotting is so brisk and constant that the movie feels paced, especially in its relentless opening minutes, like a series of its own trailers or a playlist of connected YouTube videos set to autoplay. That it literally starts with a string of YouTube videos (double rainbow, surprised cat, etc.) under the opening credits is an odd choice that nonetheless sets up the fast pace.

With that opening paragraph, I’ve probably taken more time getting to the main concept that the movie does. Dave (Jason Sudeikis) is a low-level pot dealer whose stash and cash is stolen by a gang of hoodlums. His supplier (Ed Helms) offers to wipe clean the debt and even throw in a few extra thousand dollars if he goes down to Mexico and smuggle back a “smidge of marijuana.” Dave doesn’t have much of a choice, so he agrees. Looking no further than his front steps, he sees a clean-cut family in an RV and decides that’d be the perfect disguise to sneak a bunch of pot across the border. He recruits the woman in the apartment next door, a freshly evicted stripper (Jennifer Aniston), to play his wife, and two neighborhood teens, an abandoned boy (Will Poulter) and a homeless girl (Emma Roberts), to play their kids. They may not be related, but they’re sure going to try their hardest to pass as a family. “The Millers” are going on a road trip.

It’s a great concept and I don’t blame screenwriters Bob Fisher and Steve Faber (of Wedding Crashers) and Sean Anders and John Morris (of Hot Tub Time Machine) and director Rawson Marshall Thurber (of Dodgeball) for rushing there as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, reducing the characters to types leaves little room for the movie to maneuver as it plugs them into gag-filled scenarios that attempt to wring laughter out of who the characters are instead of what they do. There’s an underlying mean-spirited judgment upon these characters because of their types, jokes that appear to find Aniston’s character inherently funny because she’s a stripper, Poulter funny because he’s a lonely overeager goof, Roberts funny because she’s homeless. Similarly, the unhappy murderous Mexican supplier (Tomer Sisley) who becomes a villain chasing them is a plot development that’d play a lot better if the movie didn’t play up Mexican “otherness” as inherently intimidating. One scene lingers on Aniston during a routine, but breaks the fourth wall with a wink. That the film knows it’s being exploitative doesn’t make it okay. Other scenes play uncomfortably with homophobia in a similarly talking-out-of-both-sides-of-the-mouth tone.

This sense of judging its characters doesn’t mix well with the otherwise freewheeling permissiveness of their behavior as they try to avoid getting caught with the pot. But luckily the movie just barrels right on past by getting great mileage out of how appealing the cast is. I liked them, and by extension their characters. The central four have a core likability and the banter they’re given is often funny in interactions that are prickly but deep down affectionate towards each other. It’s a combination that does much to alleviate the notes that sit so sourly. Even though the movie doesn’t take them seriously as people, and sometimes the characters seem a little under-concerned about the stakes of it all, I found myself wishing them well anyways. The road-trip structure of the movie keeps things hurtling along quickly. If you can survive the opening barrage of rushed, choppy set-up, you might find the pay offs to be a bit more relaxed and amiably crude. It falls into a groove that’s works well, especially whenever an RV full of a seemingly squeaky clean family (parents Nick Offerman and Kathryn Hahn with daughter Molly Quinn) runs into our disreputable foursome and attempts some good old-fashioned Americana bonding over campfires and Pictionary. That couldn’t be a worse fit with the behavior of these four and their drug-smuggling ways. 

Though for all the inappropriate dialogue, crude sight gags, and shock gross out moments, it’s a movie that’s sneakily square. The selfish, marginalized members of this family slowly come to rely on one another to find safety, camaraderie, and financial stability. These things, the movie ends up arguing, come exclusively from the typically structured nuclear family. The appearance of being mainstream-society-approved good not only lets them get away with being bad, it ends up making them, if not good, at least better. Potentially exciting avenues of sharp comedy – like the comically aggressive border patrol, say – are dumped for the squishy sentimentality of the narrative trajectory. That the “Millers” come to actually care for one another is perhaps the only way to have a movie so otherwise dedicated to bad behavior go down so easily, and with a cast so likable, it was perhaps inevitable anyways. But it results in a movie with a cynical, ugly point of view that also desires of a return to familial stability and camaraderie. Weird.

But there’s a funny thing that happens to a problematic comedy when it can manage to be funny. The wholly mechanical plotting and sour aftertaste has enough situational escalation and likable archetypes that it snowballs into something that is entertaining at the time. I felt bad later about having fallen for it, but as it played I wasn’t unhappy to be there. I found myself pulled right along and reader, it’s my duty to report to you that I occasionally laughed. I could tell you that I had a bad time watching this movie, but the truth of the matter is that I didn’t. The speed that seemed so off-putting at first soon became an asset. The totally perfunctory characters that seemed simple plot constructs in a story that had a bit of a mean streak became, through the pleasant cast, easy enough to take. To make a long story short, the movie’s fairly entertaining provided you let it evaporate naturally before you think about its implications and contradictions for too long.

Bad Boys: THAT'S MY BOY

That’s My Boy, a new R-rated Adam Sandler vehicle, is an awful movie. But, when I sat there and watched it, I laughed. Sometimes I cringed, sure, and other times I gaped with something approaching admiration at the gleeful way the bar is consistently lowered, but I left the theater feeling something like satisfied. I can’t recommend this movie. I’m not even sure I want to defend it in any way. But I laughed and it is my duty to report that reaction. After all, as Roger Ebert once said, “If I laugh, I have to tell you it’s funny. I went to see Jackass, a shameful movie. I laughed all the way through it. I mean, I have to tell you that.”

I found That’s My Boy to be a movie so exuberantly vulgar, so excessively coarse and gross-out goofy that I could almost imagine the Farrelly brothers finding it a bit over the top. (It probably has more on-screen uses for bodily fluids than any comedy since their own There’s Something About Mary.) It’s all predicated on an off-putting inciting incident and then goes on to include a couple of twists that are just about as bad. And all through it, Sandler is doing one of his patented (and usually grating) braying-accent arrested-adolescent shticks. I usually don’t like Adam Sandler movies, but after such career nadirs as Grown Ups and Jack and Jill, truly awful movies following nearly two decades of awful movies, even a mild improvement feels pretty good. What can I say? This time around I found it funny, although not at first.

The whole thing starts in the mid-80’s when a teacher (Eva Amurri Martino) has an affair with a student (Justin Weaver) – a teenager named Donny who grows up to be Adam Sandler. It’s not every day a comedy starts off with some casually presented statutory rape, but there you have it. I wasn’t laughing yet, that’s for sure. It’s uncomfortable to say the least, especially when the teacher is shipped off to prison pregnant and the eventual baby is left in the custody of the kid and his deadbeat dad. Luckily we cut ahead over twenty-five years later so we don’t have deal with the whole immediate implications of this scenario, skipping through an opening credits montage that spoofs the culture’s gendered double standard about this sort of scandal. Donny gains immediate fame through the talk show circuit – Arsenio and Letterman – as well as selling the rights to his life story for a TV movie, but soon enough his fame has dried up and he’s no better off than his fellow has-been pal Vanilla Ice (as an exaggerated buffoonish version of himself).

When the movie proper picks up, Donny, a drunken mess of perpetual boorishness, has just learned that he owes $40,000 to the IRS since he hasn’t paid taxes since 1994. He’ll go to prison unless he pays off the debt by Tuesday. Stewing at his usual table at his favorite (but dilapidated) strip club, he notices the wedding section of the New York Times where who should he see but his estranged son (Andy Samberg). He’s now a rising hedge fund manager marrying a pretty young woman (Leighton Meester) from a wealthy family. In fact, the whole wedding party – the bride’s parents (Blake Clark and Meagen Fay), grandmother (Peggy Stewart) and soldier brother (Milo Ventimiglia), the groom’s boss (Tony Orlando), and some straight-laced co-workers (Will Forte, Rachel Dratch) – is staying in a mansion on the coast of Massachusetts for the ceremony this very weekend. Donny, in a desperate attempt to raise the necessary funds, convinces a tabloid TV show to meet him at the prison and stage a reunion between teacher, student, and son and sets off to trick his son into this plan, but soon finds he’s having a pretty good time just being reunited.

So Donny bumbles his way into the wedding party and throws everybody for a loop. It’s like The Hangover crash-landed into the middle of Meet the Parents. Director Sean Anders (writer of the so-so Hot Tub Time Machine) and writer David Caspe (who works for the sit-com Happy Endings) haven’t exactly made a comedy of errors. This is a comedy of sexual dysfunction, of non-stop profanity and raunchiness, of panicked social anxiety and endlessly protracted embarrassment. But rather than mere juvenile tittering and strange squeamishness of usual Sandler fare, this is an enthusiastically rude embrace of base instincts and bad behavior. The straight-arrow son running from his irresponsible father is drawn back into his web of debauchery and is shocked to find how much fun it can be, especially when so many of the wedding guests seem so charmed by his coarseness and party-animal antics. And, sure, father and son have a lot of learning to do from each other, learning to live a full life and yada yada (it’s basically an inverted Big Daddy without the moral), but the level of manic depravity on display here is truly staggering. And I laughed a lot.

This is no typical Sandler movie, which are usually somewhere between a PG and a PG-13, lightly vulgar, cheap, sentimental efforts with plenty of saccharine uplift and a safer-than-not gross-out sensibility. This movie puts the hard-R in hard-R comedy, leaning against boundaries cheerfully and with such unashamed commitment. And the cast is so game, tearing into this material with surprisingly appealing energy and timing. This is a shameful movie that starts so tasteless it can only go up, but it still finds plenty of ways to shock, through some appalling (and funny) revelations and sheer volume of vulgarity. But surprise of surprises, Sandler and Samberg have nice chemistry and the supporting cast is so willing to go along with the surprisingly amusing material which grows more complicated and picks up speed as the narrative hurtles towards the ceremony. (And, of course, we have to see teacher and student meet again, and she’s now played by an Academy Award winning actress about whom I wouldn’t have guessed we’d now be able to say is making a habit of this sort of thing.)

Where does that leave us? It’s a movie in which sometimes-funny people have a good time in material a smidge rougher than you’d expect, finding jaw-dropping lines to cross and combining what would be all the raunchiest bits of marginally cleaner movies into one long parade of impropriety. And it’s handled with such slickness and even good-natured nastiness at times. Other times there are jokes that don’t go over so well and are just plain nastiness. The movie’s based on a premise so cringingly awful that I wish the filmmakers could have found a premise that was somewhat easier to take but that still got us to the same destination. So we’re right back where we started. I completely understand where people who will hate this movie will be coming from. It’s awful. But I did laugh.

Tub to the Future: HOT TUB TIME MACHINE

Hot Tub Time Machine has a great title. It’s short and silly; gleefully direct and goofy. If only the movie that appears after the title were possessed with similar qualities. The movie never rises to the level of the title. Or should that be lowers? Instead, the movie is a slog of manic vulgarity pitched at the same shrieking level for the entire run time. There’s little modulation to be found.

But it sure starts promisingly enough. Three middle-aged men are fed-up with their sad lives. John Cusack was dumped, Craig Robinson works at a salon for dogs, and Rob Corddry just tried to commit suicide. To try to cheer themselves up, they go away for a weekend at a ski resort that was the site of good times back when they were in their late-teens and early-twenties. Cusack has to bring his nephew, Clark Duke, along for the trip, promising him a great time. Too bad the kid would rather be playing “Second Life.” They’re all pretty depressed, a situation that isn’t helped by the decrepitude of the resort’s current state. Before you know it, their suite’s hot tub lights up with a seductive glow and burbles with suspicious bubbles. They hop in and whoosh! It’s 1986!

The movie is content to run through a typical time-travel plot, complete with paradoxes and culture-clashes, and even has a wizened, though very vague, Doc Brown figure played by Chevy Chase who pops up from time to time to deliver oddball exposition. Contributing to the 80’s vibe is Crispin Glover as the bellhop. Luckily, the movie doesn’t take itself too seriously; it’s content to wallow in the traditional trappings of a middling 80’s comedy. Unluckily, this means the (hopefully) ironic sexism and homophobia piles up until it starts to feel like the real thing. I did laugh, though, at the name of the pompous preppie who bullies the leads. Is there a more 80’s-sounding villain-name than Blaine?

The movie is essentially a whirlwind of pop-culture references and very gross gross-out gags. Director Steve Pink keeps things fast, goofy, and totally undisciplined, but the jokes just aren’t funny. It’s not really the cast’s fault. Cusack’s appealing, Duke does his best, and Robinson’s quietly hilarious. Corddry’s ultimately grating (he leaves no line un-shouted), but that’s just an example of poor direction. The main buzz-kill is the script, attributed to Josh Heald, Sean Anders, and John Morris. They came up with a great idea, but not enough details to fill it in. It’s a pile-up of desperate attempts at humor that clogs up the path of the genuinely funny moments.

I wanted to like the movie, I really did, and I would be dishonest if I sat here and wrote that I never laughed. The movie has some fun moments here and there – a cute visual echo of Sixteen Candles famous kitchen-table kiss, a funny twist on Back to the Future’s “Johnny B. Goode” sequence that substitutes Chuck Berry with the Black-Eyed Peas – but as an entire experience, the movie just falls flat.