You’d think Jennifer Aniston would be familiar with the command, “Never go full retard,” since it appeared in “Tropic Thunder,” a movie co-written by her boyfriend Justin Theroux. In “We’re the Millers,” though, everyone goes full “retard” while playing famously brain-damaged folk: Ordinary suburban Americans. In other words: Hollywood’s customers. We’ll see who’s the genius when the grosses come in, I guess.
The film is about three unrelated dirtbags and a dork who find themselves playing (i.e., hugely overplaying) a normal suburban family while carrying a load of marijuana back from Mexico in an RV.
But — Jason Sudeikis in the lead? As a drug dealer who could never hope to pass for a picket-fence type? Please, the man looks like he was born in a Lands’ End catalog. And to be his pretend wife, a skank who would seem hopelessly out of place in a sitcom? They picked Aniston.
Hiring a thieving runaway (Emma Roberts) and a flustered boy (Will Poulter) to play their kids, David (Sudeikis) and Rose (Aniston) agree to pick up (2 tons of) weed in Mexico and drive it to Denver to placate a scary drug lord. He’s played by — who else? — Ed Helms. I can picture Ed Helms climbing to the top of the drug business about as easily as I can picture him in the Victoria’s Secret catalog.
The movie, directed by the formerly promising Rawson Marshall Thurber (the hilarious “Dodgeball” and the awful “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh”), thinks it’s subverting the conventions of the sitcom with a revolutionary new idea, which is: Do everything exactly the way a sitcom would, plus lots of swearing and dirty jokes.
So: Carrying 2 tons of pot, naturally the “Millers” find themselves getting chatted up by another RV couple (Kathryn Hahn, Nick Offerman). Guess what? The hubby is a DEA agent. And due to a wacky misunderstanding, there’s almost an orgy. We’re only halfway through the movie when the capital-M sitcom Moments begin — strummy guitar music, “Dad” teaching “Son” about how not to be shy with girls.
As for Aniston’s much-hyped stripping routine (down to her undies), which befuddles a fierce drug dealer who has apparently never seen boobies before, it’s as sad as her hula dance in “Just Go With It.” For young actresses to disrobe in exchange for attention is tradition. For 44-year-olds, it’s desperation.