BEFORE: Will Ferrell carries over from "Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga" - but that's not why I was rushing to get to this one this week. I was trying to get a birthday shout-out sent out to actor Ben Platt, born 9/24/93, so Happy 27th Birthday, Ben! I know it seems like I'm a day late because this post is dated 9/25, and may not get posted until 9/26, but I started watching the film in the late evening of 9/24, just before midnight - so my birthday salute is in there, just under the wire. You may know Ben Platt from the "Pitch Perfect" movie series (films 1 + 2, but not 3) or maybe his Tony Award-winning performance in the Broadway musical "Dear Evan Hansen", back when there were such things as Broadway musicals.
But now I REALLY have to work my skip days in - so no movie tomorrow, the next film on 9/27, then 9/29, and then I'll kick off the horror chain on 10/1. Yeah, that can work, I just have to stop looking up celebrity birthdays.
THE PLOT: Two drunk parents attempt to hide their ever-increasing financial difficulties from their daughter and social circle through elaborate neighborhood schemes.
AFTER: This is a bad movie, let me be clear about that. It may even be a terrible movie, but how the hell was I supposed to know that going in? More to the point, WHY is it a bad movie, and HOW is it a bad movie, and why did someone keep on making it and distributing it if it's such a bad movie?
Let's start with what I know, first off. Nothing's funny about it, not one little bit of it. How do you set out to make a comedy and forget to tell everybody involved to make it funny, how does that happen? Nobody sets out to make a BAD movie, for sure, everybody thinks they're making a good movie, it's just that some people are wrong, or perhaps lack the ability to distinguish. I bet Alec Baldwin thought he was being funny here, maybe nobody had the nerve or the contractual obligation to tell him? Salma Hayek certainly wasn't funny, she just kind of put her head down and over-emoted and over-reacted to things, because clearly she knew that eventually the shoot would end. Now Jim Gaffigan, I expect him to be funny - I find his stand-up routines funny, though I wouldn't be surprised to find out I'm in the minority there, because some comedians are like, umm, acquired tastes. I just appreciate his particular brand of self-deprecating humor because he's constantly poking fun at his own pale whiteness or his terrible eating habits, and I think in that latter case he ends up being sort of a spokesman for fat, lazy, white Americans, who would all be doing sweet stand-up gigs if they could.
But, oh, the dreadful material that even the funny people here were given to work with. Gaffigan is cast as a registered sex offender who rents a house from the title couple, only he fails to mention that little detail until he's required by law to knock on the door of every house on the block and inform the neighbors of his status. See? That's not funny, not even a little bit. It's a terrible situation that could happen to you, you could easily rent a house or a room to somebody like that, then you'd be in a shitty situation and you certainly wouldn't be laughing. Then Gaffigan's character spends the rest of the film either doing weird exercises while half-naked, or apologizing for doing something else to the house that any sane person would know that they wouldn't be allowed to do.
Later, the Drunk Parents are forced to switch houses with the registered sex offender through a very contrived plot point, and this leads a group of local vigilantes to kidnap them, thinking they're a sex offender couple (umm, no such thing, I think), throwing them in a van, driving them out to the woods and nearly shooting them. Not funny. If you think this is funny, then you were probably doubled over with laughter when Q-Anon factions shot up that pizza joint in Washington DC because they read online that Democrats and Hollywood celebrities were using the pizzeria's basement to stash kidnapped kids, when there was no basement in the building at all. If you think it's funny to call in a SWAT team to do a drug raid on your innocent neighbor's house, then maybe this is the film for you.
Let me look at an overview, then go back to the beginning - this film has no logical structure whatsoever, it's just a bunch of random occurrences strung together that form no coherent point. The Drunk Parents aren't even drunk the whole time, they drink one bottle of wine at the start of the film, and that apparently sets off this whole chain reaction that leads to them wandering around their Long Island town (?) aimlessly (just like the plot), looking for another relative to spend the night with. Very little logic is involved here, like there's a way for one plot point to lead to the next one, but this is just random things like wearing a wig full of spiders, or a bum setting himself on fire (which happens TWICE, but repetition of an unfunny thing is not comedy, either).
At the start of the film, the couple (Frank and Nancy) is seen moving furniture from their living room to their front lawn - why? Is it a yard sale? Passersby ask them this question, and they deny it several times. OK, maybe they're being sarcastic and it IS a yard sale. But then they never put price tags on anything, they don't put up signs, they certainly don't try to sell furniture to anybody, but later on in the film, all the furniture is still there - WTF? Still later in the film, another tenant rents the house next door (they repeat this renting-the-house-on-craigs-list-though-its-not-their-house bit TWICE, too) and steals all the furniture - but he doesn't steal the furniture that's just sitting out on the lawn of the house next door? This doesn't even make sense, and it feels like somebody wasn't even trying to make it make sense! Or they didn't know how to make the plot make any sense, which seems even worse somehow.
The repo man comes to take their fancy car away, and that's when we finally get an inkling of what's going on here, they're behind on their payments for, well, everything, apparently, and credit card companies keep calling them throughout the film, and Frank usually responds with a racist voice (not funny) to get rid of them. Their daughter is just off to college, so this maybe explains why they need money, but it does NOT explain how they got into this situation in the first place. Didn't they have like eighteen years to save up for her college tuition? Were they just buying fancy furniture and expensive coffee makers instead all that time? Did they have $50,000 saved up and then it suddenly disappeared somehow, were they victims of identity theft or bank fraud? It's so very unclear, instead we're just left with a vague conception that they had money at one point, then maybe he lost his job, or they bought a house and leased a car that they really couldn't afford, spread themselves too thin and now they're in some serious debt.
It's a shame that there's an inkling of a maybe-important storyline in there somewhere, but the film refuses to address it head on, so it therefore loses all social relevance or timeliness to any current recession or depression or post-sub-prime-mortgage financial collapse. Instead let's have the main characters illegally rent out the neighbor's house to strangers and watch the comedy never quite get off the ground. Let's have them go to a service station to buy a candy bar and accidentally stumble into a drug-smuggling bust, which isn't funny either. Let's have them sleep over at her sister's house so their nephew (?) can falsely accuse them of molestation - definitely not funny, and in very questionable taste, also.
It all just seems so misguided, too - I know there was no indication when they filmed this that there would be a global pandemic and millions of people who work in stores, restaurants and movie theaters would be unemployed, but looking at this film as a distorted mirror of reality (which may be a stretch, I know) only highlights that there were dozens of better ways out of their situation than the road that they chose. They could have continued with the yard sale idea, for one. Or one of them could have taken a job in a department store or supermarket, which they might have if they weren't so worried about what their rich neighbors might think. They could have gotten a reverse mortgage, how come they considered selling their burial plots, but not that? Look, when times get tough sometimes you have to buckle down and take a job you don't want, maybe just for a while until you find something better, because the bills and the college tuition has to get paid. This is not the time for "Hey, let's see if the teen nerd next door has any ideas for niche web-sites that we can pitch to the investors down at the golf club." And how are they still members at the golf club, anyway, if they don't have any money? That's just one of several hundred small details here that don't make any sense.
Huge NITPICK POINT: the epilogue of the film is set at Thanksgiving, which is preceded by a title card that reads "Two months later". Therefore, counting back, the week of outrageous non-funny circumstances depicted in the film takes place in September, which makes some sense, because their daughter has just left for college. But somewhere on Day 4 or 5 of that week there's a huge snowstorm, which would be extremely rare during a New York September, especially when you factor in recent climate change. Then on the next day, all the snow is magically gone, and all the furniture that's been out on the front lawn still seems fine. Sure, a freak snowstorm with several feet of snow and it all melts in one day. Did nobody in the editing or continuity departments notice this?
This film is now officially in the running for Worst Film of the Year, and it's going to be tough to beat.
Also starring Alec Baldwin (last seen in "Motherless Brooklyn"), Salma Hayek (last seen in "How to Be a Latin Lover"), Jim Gaffigan (last seen in "13 Going on 30"), Joe Manganiello (last seen in "Rampage"), Natalia Cigliuti, Ben Platt (last seen in "Ricki and the Flash"), Aimee Mullins, Sasha Mitchell, Treat Williams (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in America"), Olivia Luccardi (last seen in "Money Monster"), Aasif Mandvi (last seen in "The Proposal"), Scott "Kid Cudi" Mescudi (last seen in "Killing Hasselhoff"), Michelle Veintimilla (last seen in "Fathers & Daughters"), Kelly Aucoin (last seen in "The Wizard of Lies"), JoJo Kushner (last seen in "The Intern"), Dan Soder (last seen in "Trainwreck"), Stephen Gevedon, Matthew Porter, Eddie Schweighardt (last seen in "The Skeleton Twins"), Jeremy Shinder (last seen in "Going in Style"), Meg Wolf, Mark Gessner (last seen in "Youth"), Brian Donahue (last seen in "She's Funny That Way"), Adam Enright, Peter Gaulke, with a cameo from Colin Quinn (last seen in "Sandy Wexler").
RATING: 2 out of 10 spider bites
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