We're The Millers review: Juvenile jokes and crude innuendo: We're The Millers fails to impress despite the hype

By Chris Tookey

PUBLISHED: 21:39 GMT, 22 August 2013 | UPDATED: 11:46 GMT, 23 August 2013

We're The Millers (15)

Verdict: Too gross, but funny

Rating:

We're The Millers is another film that fails to live up to the promise of the director’s first movie.

Rawson Marshall Thurber gave us the unexpectedly hilarious Dodgeball. 

We’re The Millers, like Elysium, has enough about it to show that the director has talent, but falls disappointingly short of being a great movie.

It tries and just about succeeds in making us care about middle-aged drug-dealer (Jason Sudeikis) who needs to smuggle an enormous stash of pot across the Mexican border.

Jason Sudeikis (left) stars as a middle-aged drug dealer who recruits stripper Jennifer Aniston (second left) to pose as his wife to smuggle drug over the Mexican border

To achieve this, he rents a huge recreational vehicle and recruits a striptease artist (Jennifer Aniston) to be his ‘wife’, a homeless girl with piercings (Emma Roberts) to be his ‘daughter’ and the gormless 18-year-old who lives in his apartment building (Will Poulter) to be his ‘son’.

The script development is funnier and more ingenious than you might expect, and the actors have the comic timing to pull off most of it.

The standout is the young British actor Poulter, who finds sweetness, depth and complexity in a role that might have been clich?d. 

Aniston is a better comedienne than most people realise and has perfected the art of the quizzical reaction shot.

With hired children in tow, played by Will Poulter and Emma Roberts, there is a battle in tone between a family sitcom and Hangover-style sleaze

Sudeikis has a goofy charm that almost — but not quite — offsets the tackiness of his role. The one misfit is Roberts, who is outclassed and brings an air of blandness to a role that needed the edge Christina Ricci brought to her teenage appearances.

A more serious weakness, however, is that the screenplay relies far too much on sexual crudeness.

Not only does it fail to be funny, it never convinces that the people who express themselves with such toe- curling explicitness would ever do so in real life, least of all in front of strangers.

The result is a film that contains more than a few laughs but never coheres. There’s a battle between well-structured, family sitcom and sleazy, Hangover-style lewdness.

The two don’t fit well together and a lot of people will find the off-colour sexual references offensive.

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