We're the Millers Review

From Austin Chronicle...
I do not own this picture/poster. We're the Millers and/or Imp Awards owns it all.

The R-rated comedy gets a little harder with We’re the Millers, pun intended. Among other things, it features an 18-year-old’s swollen, grapefruit-sized testicle on prominent display not once, not twice, but three times. (A pesky tarantula bite causes the gonad’s temporary elephantiasis.) Not since another 18-year-old boinked an apple pie has a movie played teenage male anatomy for such raunchy laughs. It’s only a matter of time until someone crosses the Rubicon with a pants-down, full-on (well, maybe only half-mast) boner that takes good-natured vulgarity to the next graphic level. The question is: Will anyone be shocked? At this rate, it’s unlikely. But if We’re the Millers is any indication, rest assured it will be outrageously funny in the right hands, so to speak.
With its tongue firmly in cheek – as well as in someone’s mouth most of the time – We’re the Millers celebrates family values in a most nontraditional way. It exaggerates the contempt that familiarity can breed between spouses and siblings – the middle finger is the typical means of communication for the members of the faux Miller clan – while depicting the affection and loyalty that develops from the same intimacy. In its own twisted way, it’s a comedic take on the love/hate dynamic that Eugene O’Neill and Edward Albee mined so powerfully in their best work. If you’ve seen the movie’s trailer, you know the storyline. A small-time Denver drug dealer (Sudeikis), who’s deeply in debt to his source, recruits a stripper (Aniston), a geek (Poulter), and a runaway (Roberts) to pose as his wife and kids as part of a plan to smuggle a huge shipment of marijuana from Mexico to the States. His thinking? No one will suspect the gee-willikers foursome of any criminal activity as they cross the international border in a mammoth recreational vehicle packed with enough pot to impress even Willie Nelson. While its plot points are pedestrian at best, the genius – at least, the definite charm – of We’re the Millers is its notion of family as something beyond a simple blood connection, particularly when exigent circumstances create the ties that.


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The Smurfs Sequel Review

From Roger E Bert...
 I do not own this picture/poster. The Smurfs and/or

This weekend, many parents are going to see "The Smurfs 2" under duress. They don't want to disappoint their children, who are wanting to see the film, and won't stop talking about it until they do. As lousy as it is, I won't discourage any parent from going to see "The Smurfs 2." After all, the film's big take-away message is at least partially noble: "love is [not] conditional." Any parent that goes to see "The Smurfs 2" is essentially teaching their children that lesson by example. Adults suffer so that their know-nothing spawn can enjoy all-too-brief happiness: Parenthood 101, right?
Still, you should know that "The Smurfs 2" is a charmless endurance test. It wears you down with tossed-off Smurf-related puns like, "I almost smurfed myself," and "Sometimes, you gotta smurf with the changes." Naturally charming performers like Neil Patrick Harris, Brendan Gleeson, and Hank Azaria are consistently wasted on a script that's like Mad Libs as filled in by a monomaniacal, but schematically programmed spambot ("Well, that was ducked up," one character groans after being transformed into, well, a duck). "The Smurfs 2" is generally moronic and unmoving when it most needs to be cute and disarming. Reluctant parents: you don't need to tell your kids that you won't love them if they like "The Smurfs 2." Instead, you can silently judge them until either you and/or they simply can't bear the thought of talking to each other.


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Growns Up 2 Review

From Variety...
I do not own this picture/poster. Grown Ups 2 and/or Impawards owns it all.
 
The first scene in “Grown Ups 2” depicts a deer urinating directly onto Adam Sandler’s face. The penultimate scene (spoiler alert) depicts the very same deer apparently castrating Taylor Lautner. These bookends are not only the film’s highlights, they also represent the closest it comes to establishing any sort of narrative throughline. Among the slackest, laziest, least movie-like movies released by a major studio in the last decade, “Grown Ups 2” is perhaps the closest Hollywood has yet come to making “Ow! My Balls!” seem like a plausible future project. It is all but guaranteed a strong opening weekend.

SEE MORE: From the July 16, 2013 issue of Variety

A follow-up to 2010’s critically savaged yet massively lucrative “Grown Ups,” this sequel introduces a few changes. Most obviously, although Dennis Dugan is back in the director’s chair and stars Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock and David Spade all reprise their roles as high-school buddies turned over-the-hill dads, Rob Schneider is mysteriously missing. But more importantly, while “Grown Ups” made some often cringeworthy attempts to shoehorn maudlin life lessons and character arcs into all the crotch smashing, this sequel barely attempts to function as a piece of narrative filmmaking at all, almost immediately devolving into a hash of frantic, random incidents strung together with the slimmest sliver of coherence

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