'We're the Millers': It's Miller time
Funny premise wears out its welcome in "We're the Millers," about a seedy dealer who creates a fake family to smuggle drugs.
"WE'RE the Millers" gets by, for a while, on the gravitational pull of its ingeniously simple premise.
Jason Sudeikis, a seedy dealer coerced into a dangerous over-the-border smuggling operation, devises the perfect camouflage - earnest Midwestern tourist in an RV, a family of grinning squares in tow.
He has no actual family, so he hires a stripper (Jennifer Aniston), a runaway (Emma Roberts) and a neglected teen boy (Will Poulter) to pose as his wife and kids.
There's a richly subversive joke built in to this scenario - disparate people thrown together, trying not to drive each other crazy.
That's not a fake family. That's a real family.
So, the setup is there, but something gets lost on the way to the punch line.
Casting is an issue. Sudeikis is a bit too slick and old to be convincing as the once-promising college undergrad still selling dope.
Aniston, though still possessed of a terrific figure, is the least enthusiastic pole dancer in the history of movies, and Roberts still carries the baggage of Nancy Drew.
Poulter gets laughs as a virginal teen who gets kissing lessons from his sister and mom, and later gets his junk stung by a spider as the movie enters warmed-over Farrelly brothers territory.
Director Rawson Marshall Thurber ("Dodgeball") seems satisfied with slapstick and caricature.
Nick Offerman and Kathryn Hahn turn up as the naturally occurring version of the artificial Millers, and the movie takes pointless shots at their values, whizzing all over the very audience it should be trying to engage and entertain.
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