Yes, you can tell exactly where We’re the Millers is going to end up by the end pretty much from the start of the film. But that doesn’t mean that just about everything between start and finish isn’t hilarious, or that some of the places the script ventures won’t surprise the heck out of you. Thus, it’s certainly not the year’s most innovative or original comedy. But it is one of the summer’s funniest so far.
David Clark (Jason Sudeikis) is a small-time weed dealer who has his relatively unambitious operation down to well-practiced routine. He sells his many cleverly-named varietals of Mary Jane to suburbanites, yuppies, neighbors, and whoever else might present him with the right amount of cash, but he doesn’t deal to kids and he doesn’t have any designs on being a “kingpin.” it’s practically become a ho-hum job, and David doesn’t mind.
For the most part, David only worries about taking care of himself, and it works for him and his business. But on the one occasion he tries to do a good deed for someone else, a runaway girl being mugged in the alley across the street from his apartment, he finds himself getting robbed of his weed plus the cash he’d been making for his supplier, Brad (Ed Helms). Naturally, Brad (who spends his ill-gotten fortune on, among other things, large predatory marine mammals) is loathe to simply let the matter go, and so he offers David a deal: Fly to Mexico, pick up a “smidge” of product, bring it back across the border in an RV that Brad will provide, and the loss will be forgiven and significant payment for the job will be rendered.
Of course, how precisely David is to get the RV back across the border without it being searched by border authorities and getting himself arrested for drug smuggling is a problem requiring a creative solution. The neophyte drug smuggler’s eventual master plan? Recruit the runaway he saved from the muggers, Casey (Emma Roberts), the dorky kid who lives in the apartment beneath him, Kenny (Will Poulter), and the stripper neighbor who hates his guts, Rose (Jennifer Aniston), to be his pretend wife and kids, and use them along with trading in his flannel and jeans for a polo shirt and khakis to pass the whole lot of them off as a family on vacation.
Thus begins the “Millers'” odyssey, a journey that will include run-ins with gun-totting drug runners, corrupt and slightly sexually-deviant federales, poisonous arachnids, carnies, and, perhaps scariest of all, a REAL family of Americans on vacation.
By all rights, We’re the Millers shouldn’t be nearly as funny as it turns out to be. It works thanks to a script that plays to the strengths of its cast — Sudeikis’s talent for delivering quips and Aniston’s should-be-patented exasperated look (as well as the bod she clearly worked hard to get into exotic dancer shape), to name a few — and is just crude enough to make you laugh without getting gross. The film earns its R-rating here primarily from the dialogue – there’s no dearth of f-bombs and middle fingers here. But it doesn’t just settle for easy, crude humor and profanity. There’s actual cleverness here, and it lifts the material as a whole. Watch in particular for the scenes featuring Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation‘s Ron Swanson) and Kathryn Hahn, who practically steal the show as the long-time married couple who think they may have found in David and Rose Miller the type of adventure they’ve only read about in “Spice Up Your Sex Life!” books and articles. There’s also quite possibly the funniest sequence put on film ever featuring a spider bite in an uncomfortable place. Funny stuff. Stay for the outtakes in the credits, too – some real gems in there, including a gag played on Aniston that’s sheer genius.
Again, is the ending predictable? Sure it is, and if that in and of itself is too much of a turn-off, then spend your money on a ticket for something else. But We’re the Millers will defy your expectations in just about every other way if you give it a chance. At the very least, it has a great deal more to offer in terms of laughs than just what’s in the trailers, and that’s more than can be said for quite a few other big budget comedies that have bowed in theaters so far in 2013.
Score: 3.5 out of 5
We’re the Millers
Starring Jennifer Aniston, Jason Sudeikis, Emma Roberts, Nick Offerman, Kathryn Hahn, and Ed Helms. Directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber.
Running Time: 110 minutes
Rated R for crude sexual content, pervasive language, drug material and brief graphic nudity.