We’re the Millers
Film & TV
We’re the Millers is the new road comedy from Dodgeball director Rawson Marshall Thurber about a small-time drug dealer making a forced transition into drug smuggling using a fake family as a cover.
The plot follows the plight of David Burke (Jason Sudeikis), a small-time pot dealer whose life has remained pretty much unchanged since his college days a decade or so ago. Things begin to unravel when he attempts to help out some local kids but ends up losing both his stash and his savings. Now in serious debt to his supplier Brad (Ed Helms), David is forced to try to wipe the slate clean by smuggling Brad’s latest shipment over the border from Mexico. After a light-bulb moment in which David realizes a squeaky-clean, all-American family is the perfect drug-smuggling cover, he sets about putting together his “family.” David twists the arms of cynical stripper with a heart-of-gold Rose (Jennifer Aniston), nerdy teen-aged virgin Kenny (Will Poulter) and street-wise runaway Casey (Emma Roberts). With his fake family cleaned up and repackaged as “The Millers”, they head south to Mexico to pick up the shipment of pot in their enormous RV and smuggle it back across the border.
The film has a rather bizarre writing pedigree, with the initial idea and first drafts of the script coming from Bob Fischer and Steve Faber of Wedding Crashers fame, only to have the job finished off by Sean Anders and John Morris, writers of the vastly different comedy Hot Tub Time Machine. The resulting hybrid of these comedic styles makes for a film that finds its laughs in diverse places. There are a generous number of laugh-out-loud moments interspersed with hilariously cringe-worthy scenes that have you squirming uncomfortably in your seat.
We’re the Millers is a Griswold’s family vacation style film liberally spiced with sex and drug references. The plot and resolution are predictable but interestingly the film’s best moments come not from the dialogue or situational comedy but from the strangely successful casting of nice-guy Jason Sudeikis as a drug dealer and girl-next-door Jennifer Aniston as a stripper.
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This film delivers exactly what it promises – a lightweight, slightly crass, Hollywood-style road movie about sex, drugs and family. This is a great movie for anyone who wants nothing more than to sit down, forget life for an hour and a half and laugh.
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