While it set my expectations admittedly low, We’re The Millers mildly surprises with a not bad laugh quotient. If you ward off its cheap sentimentality, you can do far worse for a summer comedy in a year of Identity Thief and numerous other turkeys.
Much has been made of 44 year-old Jennifer Aniston playing a stripper. She and neighbor Jason Sudeikis, hardly a match made in heaven, play wife and husband in a fake family designed as a disguise to aid Sudeikis’ sudden need to smuggle an SUV full of marijuana in from Mexico. There’s a gaggle of sit-com enriched jokes, some zany, some crusty (Aniston doing a half-baked, nudity-free strip tease to throw off a mean drug lord). Ed Helms, who has a pet killer whale, nevertheless never seemed less menacing–yet as Sudeikis’s supplier he manages to get him in a tizzy over a drug debt that sets up the border caper. The inevitable cartoon Mexican villains also soon emerge.
Sudeikis only deals pot and never to kids. Nobody in this fake family seems to ever smoke it. The two parentless teenagers they “adopt” for their enterprise are hopelessly innocent (Will Poulter) and bittersweet-streetwise (Emma Roberts looking more like Sarah Michelle Gellar everyday). The actual straight family they encounter includes the brilliant Nick Offerman, (see his his marvelous turn in The Kings of Summer), and Kathryn Hahn as eccentric middle-of-the-roaders who have in tow a daughter that is conveniently Poulter’s age. He blows his first chance with her, however, when she catches him receiving kissing lessons from his fake sister and mom.
The actors play off each other rather well, there’s good timing to the better jokes, and director Rawson Marshall Thurber (Dodgeball) keeps it all from falling too far into Dumbland. Sudeikis and Aniston are especially good at demonstrating just how clashing their characters’ personalities are. Nothing stupendous here, for sure, but its callous and sharp enough to keep its edge while the drip, drip, drip of screenplay cliche intermittently threatens. Even a rather erotic-free Aniston makes up for an absence of hotness with dependable comedienne chops.
3 We’re The Makers of a Decent Laugh-fest in a Summer of Comedy Dreck (out of 5 stars)