We're The Millers

Patton Oswalt once delineated three kinds of open mic comics: struggling novices with a point of view, amusing but hackneyed jokesters, and lunatics. If We’re The Millers were an open mic comic, it would fall in the second category. By saying that I know I sound harsher about the flick than I mean to be. The movie brings the funny, and I eventually lost count of the number of times I giggled, chuckled, or tittered. I guess I just want to manage your expectations. We’re the Millers makes with the laugh-laugh, but it won’t redefine comedy.

Premise: David, a small-time pot dealer with little to show for his twoscore years on Earth, gets rolled by thieves and loses his entire stash because he tried to extricate Casey, an ungrateful street urchin, from their clutches. Now, to cover his losses with Brad, his Bond villainesque connection, David has to go down to Mexico, tell some drug lords he’s picking up a consignment of pot for Pablo Chacone--Brad’s supposed nome de guerre--and smuggle the weed back across the border. Since he’d stick out as a single guy at the border crossing, David decides to recruit people to help him pretend to be the patriarch of a conservative, suburban family on vacation--the titular Millers. He chooses Kenny, his virginal neighbor; Rose, a stripper who needs to escape her superlatively sleazy boss; and Casey, who could use a roof over her head.

Of course, everything must go wrong with this plan, in ways that leave the Millers vulnerable both to angry drug lords and a vacationing DEA agent (Nick Offermann, in a role that adds an intriguing hint of bisexuality to his Parks and Recreation persona.) 

Some of We’re the Millers’s joke setups and plot developments are crashingly obvious. Naturally, when Rose and Casey teach Kenny how to kiss a girl, Kenny’s new crush just happens to walk in and get the wrong idea; and the only people who don’t know that David and Rose, who hate each other when the movie opens, will eventually fall in love are David and Rose. Still, the movie plays its beats with style and a humor that may not always be original, but that isn’t insulting either. It helps that the cast is given charming, likable characters to play, and that the movie never demands they break their characters’ integrity for the sake of a cheap laugh. (Given that one of those laughs involves a spider bite in an intimate region, that’s an impressive feat.)

We’re the Millers is funnier than it has a right to be, mainly because its strong cast and smart line-by-line dialog make noting the seams in its plot feel churlish. It’s not Dr. Strangelove or Young Frankenstein, but if you need a chuckle or fifty, you’ll be able to laugh at We’re the Millers without hating yourself afterwards.

Check it out.