I have my own personal blacklist I keep of actors that I don’t watch, and Johnny Depp is near the top. I don’t mind him in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, nor as one third of the replacement for Heath Ledger in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, but I’ve never seen him as a pirate, and I try to avoid anything in which he is linked to Tim Burton or Hunter S. Thompson. So I’ve never seen the original television version of <i.21 Jump Street. But despite the movie version’s connection to Depp (and the rumors that he would have a cameo in it), I’d heard enough positive opinions of the film to make me overcome my aversion and give it a shot. I’m glad I did.

The film begins with Schmidt and Jenko (Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum) in high school, where they run in different circles. Schmidt is an Eminem wannabe who rarely gets up the courage to talk to girls and gets rejected whenever he does, while Jenko is a popular but brainless jock, and the only reason they know each other is that the former is often the butt of the latter’s jokes. But that’s enough to allow them to recognize each other a few years later when they both find themselves struggling through the police academy. Schmidt aces all the exams but fails the physical challenges, while Jenko has the opposite problem. But unlike high school, they decide to team up and help each other, and they manage to pass the academy.

But just because they managed to pass doesn’t make them good cops. When they completely flub their first attempted bust, their captain (played by Nick Offerman) reassigns them to an undercover division attempting to infiltrate area high schools. They can kind of pass for high school students, and Sagan High has a growing and potentially fatal drug problem. Schmidt dreads this duty since he had a hard enough time in high school the first time around, but Jenko is pumped about once again being able to rule the school and be the center of attention. But while Jenko is beginning to realize that maybe you can’t go home again, Schmidt has to deal with the even more horrifying reality that maybe you can.

Everyone seems to be saying that this is the best comedy of the year so far, and they’re right. It’s true that there isn’t a whole lot of competition so far, but it would have given most 2011 comedies a run for their money as well. It’s got quite a bit of action mixed in with the comedy, so it stays lively even if it is a little longer than the average comedy. It usually avoids falling into most of the standard cliches that other films like this seem to find, and it creates some pretty great images that help enhance its humor. There is perhaps a bit of creepiness with a kind of romance between a high school student and someone only pretending to be a high school student, but what’s even creepier is that it somehow makes the audience root for it to work out.

21 Jump Street manages to be both a good comedy and a good action film, and sometimes even both at the same time. There are a lot of well-known actors giving solid performances, including a few cameos from the original television show, and they’re generally given good roles to play rather than simply relying on audience recognition for effect. I’m not sure that I want to watch it over and over, but it was certainly a much better movie than you might have expected based only on the source material and main cast.

Will Ferrell is one of those guys who often gets “benefit of the doubt” laughter. Even if what he’s doing right now isn’t funny, you know that he’s been funny in the past, and maybe laughing at his stuff is a kind of muscle memory. That’s the only thing I could think of when watching the trailer for Casa de mi Padre, because even though the trailer mostly plays it straight without any real evidence of comedy, there were people laughing through the trailer every time I saw it.

Whatever impression the trailer may provide, the film actually does try to be a comedy. I say “try”, because it’s not always very successful at this. It features Ferrell as Armando, the son of a wealthy but aging Mexican rancher who is about ready to hand over the reins to someone else. He would prefer that person not be Armando, because although he works hard, he’s not very smart, and his father doesn’t have much confidence in him. But Armando has an older brother Raul (Diego Luna) who is a successful businessman and conveniently shows up at just the right time in the plot to keep the story moving. And Raul has also brought with him his beautiful fiancee Sonia (Genesis Rodriguez) who stirs up some feelings in Armado that he’s never had before.

Mexico can be a pretty dangerous place, in large part because of the drug dealers that roam the area. As a child, Armando’s mother was killed right in front of him when she was accosted by a couple of dealers, and just recently he witnessed another murder on his own property when area kingpin Onza (Gael García Bernal) executed a competing dealer. This has instilled Armando with an understandable dislike for drug dealers, and that creates some conflicting feelings when he learns that his brother Raul is himself engaged in the trade. But what makes it even worse for him is that Raul frequently sells in the United States, so he is not only in danger from Onza but also from the American DEA.

Casa de me Padre has the feeling of a very entry-level film. It is subtitled, but it uses only basic Spanish, so anyone who took Spanish 101 in high school (and learned a few curse words on the side) can probably follow along without too much difficulty. Its humor is at a similar level of sophistication, making use of puppets and models and dumb jokes that are often so obvious that you’ve usually anticipated and gotten tired of a gag before it’s even happened. There are a few laughs, but not enough to keep things entertaining for the entirety of its short 84-minute runtime. I would say it’s the kind of film for people who don’t like to think too much, but when you’re in the mood to watch a movie that doesn’t make you think, you’re probably not in the mood to have to read what people are saying.

I had pretty low expectations when I went into the movie, and it did manage to exceed them, so at least that’s a positive. It’s not a horrible movie by any stretch, but it’s just lazy and ineffective when it comes to comedy.

Jeff and I have something in common. You see, I too live at home. And since you could define home as “where you live”, so does pretty much everyone else who isn’t homeless. So perhaps the title for Jeff, Who Lives at Home isn’t as clever as it could have been, but “We Need to Talk About Kevin” had already been claimed, so I guess you have to take what you can get.

In this case, the home in which Jeff (played by Jason Segel) lives is also inhabited by his mother Sharon (Susan Sarandon). Jeff is thirty years old with no job and no ambition beyond smoking pot all the time. This usually puts him in a mood to be perceptive to the messages that the universe puts out, and today that message (from a phone call with wrong number) was “Kevin”. But the second message (from his mom) was to get off his butt and fix a broken shutter in the pantry door. This requires little more than applying a little glue to each end and sticking it in place, but they don’t have any glue so he has to go out and get some. And that’s where the adventure starts.

Through a series of coincidences (which aren’t really coincidences, since Jeff believes that everything happens for a reason), Jeff’s path crosses that of his brother Pat (Ed Helms) who just had an argument with his wife Linda (Judy Greer) and thinks that she might be cheating on him. Through a series of Kevin-related and non-Kevin related events, the universe continues to bring Jeff, Pat, and Linda together, even after they try to go their separate ways.

For what is ultimately a very low-key movie in which much of the action simply happens rather than resulting from the actions of the characters, it manages to evoke a pretty wide range of emotions. It’s funny and frustrating and sad and happy. It’s brilliantly written by the Duplass brothers (who also directed), and played perfectly. It relies heavily on coincidence at several turns, but because Jeff’s entire ethos is that there are no coincidences, it manages to pull it off without being hokey or unbelievable, and also without feeling preachy or pushy. It’s very much a “let’s see what happens” kind of movie that really makes you want to come along with it.

If I have any complaints about the movie, it is that one of the story lines seems very disconnected from the others. There are four main story lines in the film: Jeff and the universe, Jeff and Pat, Pat and Linda, and Sharon and a secret admirer. The first three of these are completely intertwined and work together to create the story. The fourth seems to be largely something that happens to Sharon with a significant impact on her, but no real connection to the rest of the stories. While Sharon is an important character for spurring Jeff into action, and to a lesser extent for uniting him with Pat, the subplot with her secret admirer could have been completely removed from the film without damaging it in any way. On the other hand, I do think that if her storyline had been connected to those of the others (which could have been done fairly easily), it would have resulted a much more complete story with fewer loose ends.

Even with a stray subplot, Jeff, Who Lives at Home is a completely enthralling and highly enjoyable movie that actually stands up well to multiple viewings (although this does amplify its main weakness along with its many strengths). It’s definitely a film worth checking out if you have the opportunity.

As if real movie trailers aren’t bad enough, there’s been a trend in the last few years of creating fake trailers for movies that don’t exist. The 2007 Grindhouse double-feature had a number of fake trailers between the two films, and at least one of them (featuring Danny Trejo as Machete) was actually made into a real movie (albeit not a good one). Similarly, the film Hobo with a Shotgun also began life as a fake trailer that was turned into a very enjoyable movie. Unfortunately, I never got the chance to hope that the trailer for The FP was just a hoax.

Frazier Park is a fairly small town in southern California, a little northwest of Los Angeles. At first glance, it would seem pretty normal. But on a closer look, there is something horribly wrong. It’s like it was ground zero for an A-bomb detonation, but in this case “A” is for “asshole”. It’s almost like a post-apocalyptic devolution where everyone is trying to see whether they can make themselves look dumber than they sound, and it’s a tight race. Every sentence out of their mouths is laced with stupidity and profanity, and rival gangs are always fighting each other over who gets what turf. But they do their fighting with their feet rather than their fists. They play a game called “Beat Beat Revelation” (i.e., we couldn’t get the rights to use “Dance Dance Revolution”).

Two of the biggest gangs are the “248” from the north, and the “245” from the south (and although this isn’t explicitly stated in the movie, it seems that these are telephone exchanges within the 661 area code). BTRO (pronounced bee-trow) is the best Beat-Beat player in the 248, while the 245 is ruled by L Dubba E, and in one particularly heated match BTRO’s legs started to give out, and then his whole body. BTRO died, and his younger brother JTRO couldn’t take it anymore. He left the thug life and got a normal job and started talking and dressing like a normal person. But when L Dubba E seized this opportunity to take over the town, the fate of the FP rests in JTRO’s feet.

Even the most uptight stick in the mud has to get some enjoyment out of the trailer for The FP. It’s the kind of thing that’s just about perfect for a two-minute trailer, and is excruciating for an 82-minute movie. If you take out everything from the trailer, the film is just a lot of swearing, a couple of unnecessarily long training montages, and what is kind of a disgusting trailer park love story. There’s surprisingly little BBR-playing in the film, and what is there is pretty anti-climactic. Even the film’s climax is anti-climactic. What happens at the end isn’t surprising, but I was surprised by how lame they managed to make it seem.

The only reason I saw this movie is because it is being distributed by Drafthouse Films and I wanted to support them. However, I’m surprised Drafthouse Films would have picked this movie, not so much because of the content, but because it’s almost contrary to the experience they want to provide in Alamo Drafthouse theaters. The theaters are like churches for movies, with strict policies preventing talking, texting, or other kinds of disruptive behaviors, but the kinds of people who really get into The FP are the worst offenders in this regard. There’s not much chance I would have liked The FP even if the people next to me weren’t talking for most of the movie (and yelling a couple of times), but it certainly added to the frustration of the experience.

I think that every sitcom from the last 30 years containing one or more high school kids has done a “let’s throw a party while your parents are out of town” episode. They all follow pretty much the same recipe: they party gets out of hand, stuff gets broken, the kids try to hide it from the parents. They usually get caught and punished, or they have to go to extremes in order to atone for their sins, but in the end they learn a valuable lesson and relationships are stronger as a result. They’re formulaic, but the good ones can still find a way to be fun.

Project X starts off with the same old cliche. It’s Thomas’ 17th birthday, which just happens to coincide with his parents’ anniversary. So they’re going out of town to celebrate their anniversary, and they’ve given Thomas permission to have maybe four or five friends over for his birthday. Thomas is definitely not one of the cool kids at school, and in fact he’s mostly invisible, so he lets his best friends Costa and J.B. talk him into a small party of say fifty people. But of Costa wants to do his friend a favor, so he invites a few more people, and they invite a few more people, and so on. And things start to get out of control.

However, there are some deviations from the old standard. This is a hard-R movie rather than an after-school special, so it’s got a lot more swearing and nudity and sex crimes than you’re used to from this kind of story, the destruction is more than just a broken vase or stained carpet, and there are substantially fewer lessons learned by the end. It tries to be Superbad, but fails miserably and just ends up being more crude and less funny. Actually, not at all funny. The only attempts at comedy in the film are via shock value, but the initial attempts are so blatant and ineffective that you’re completely numbed to what comes later. I have no trouble at all believing that this was the work of a first-time (and hopefully only-time) director, but I’m shocked that Michael Bacall, who had a hand in the absolutely awesome Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and reportedly hilarious 21 Jump Street, could have also been responsible for this mess.

To further its failure, the film is told via found footage, and it’s one of the sloppiest examples yet. With only a couple of exceptions, there’s only a single camera operator (who’s introduced with a derogatory slur and then is mostly ignored until a lame attempt at a joke near the end), and yet we see lots of different camera angles, in and out of the water, simultaneously up on the roof and down on the ground, etc. There’s no reason they couldn’t have made it like a traditional movie, but the characters’ acknowledgement of the camera and its operator just creates a new way for this movie to fail.

It’s hard to see anything of any value in Project X. It’s basically the standard TV plot except that they’ve chopped off any hint of a moral and kept stuffing in crudeness until it was long enough to be considered a movie. If you’re thinking about watching this, then just go with Superbad or Sixteen Candles or that episode of Saved by the Bell where they broke Screech’s mom’s Elvis statue, or any of the millions of other better examples of the same story.

A movie about Navy SEALs in which the soldiers are played by real SEALs. It sounds like a recipe for authentic action and horrible acting. But maybe the soldiers are actually decent actors, and even if they aren’t, then maybe the action can make up for it. But neither of those was the case for Act of Valor.

Abu Shabal is a bad guy. While in the Philippines, he managed to blow up a bunch of kids, along with a US ambassador, with a bomb-filled ice cream truck, and to pick up a bunch of wannabe martyrs in the process. Christo is also a bad guy, and while in Costa Rica he orchestrated the capture of Dr. Lisa Morales because he knew that she was also working at gathering intelligence on a link between him and Abu. And when Lisa is captured, the Americans learn about it almost immediately and call in an elite force to rescue her. It’s an intense mission involving snipers, machine guns, RPGs, armored boats, and a multi-car chase, but the good guys prevail and Lisa is rescued. But more important than that, Lisa’s cell phone is rescued, because it contains not only proof of a collaboration between Abu and Christo, but information about a plot to infiltrate the United States with jihadists wearing lethal bomb vests that are thin enough to wear under clothes without arousing suspicion and won’t set off metal detectors. Now it’s necessary to find the bad guys and take them out before they make it into the country.

To call the real-life Navy SEALs bad actors would be a tremendous compliment. They are truly awful. Unfortunately, the actors in other roles don’t get to use the “this isn’t my real job” excuse, nor the writers, directors, cinematographers, editors, and others involved with the production, but they are all equally horrible at what they do. Many of the action scenes are good, and the fight near the beginning in the rescue is a lot of fun. Unfortunately, there is far too much time spent in the film when fighting isn’t happening, and it really suffers as a result. There are a lot of filler scenes that aren’t important to the plot. There is a surplus of scenes showing the SEALs’ comradery, and others showing them as real family men. There is an excess of voiceover. And yet with all of this stuff-between-the-fighting scenes, we still miss out on key parts of the story. The SEALs are just handed information with no explanation for how it was obtained that allows them to show up at exactly the right place at exactly the right time in order to complete the next step in the mission. There’s a laughable “interrogation” scene in which a bad guy goes from blithely mocking a soldier to telling him everything he knows with no more prompting than having his desk cleared off forcefully. And the end is so thick with pandering that it’s simply revolting.

Early on, I still held out hope that the action would be strong enough to overcome all the negatives, and the first rescue mission even served to bolster that prospect. I was willing to overlook the large number of first-person shots making the film look like a video game. I was OK with the stupidity of a covert night mission in which all of the soldiers had their easily-visible laser sights on and eliminating any possibility of stealth. But there is an obvious turning point in the quality of the action where something so stupid happens that it elicited a simultaneous groan from everyone in the theater, and all the fighting that happened after that was tainted with ridiculousness. And when the big climax finally comes, the film chooses to hunker down and get even more stupid rather than make an attempt at redeeming itself.

This is a film that was doomed long before the decision to use real soldiers instead of real actors, and in fact that decision is probably the only thing it has going for it. If they had used real actors with the same script and crew, there’s no way it could have been anything but a complete flop. But the press generated from the “real soldiers” gimmick and the general expectation of sub-par acting allowed the film to make back its budget a few times over which only raises the real and scary possibility that they’ll try something like this again.

My interest in movies has led me to read a number of books on film analysis and screenwriting and other related topics. One of the points that these books keep hammering home is that a film needs to have conflict in pretty much every scene in order to stay interesting. Another is that all of the story lines need to connect back somehow to the main plot. Oka! is kind of an enigma for me because it fails at both of these and yet it still managed to hold my attention.

Larry Whitman (played by Kris Marshall) is a tall, gaunt, white man, and yet he has managed to become the world’s leading expert on the music of the Bayaka tribe of Pygmies in the Central African Republic. Despite his standing head and shoulders and chest above the Bayaka people, and despite the notable difference in skin color, he has managed to earn their trust over the years and has been accepted as a kind of unofficial member of their tribe. But he’s still an American and during his most recent trip home, he began to notice health problems. His doctor told him his liver was pretty much gone and he was in pretty desperate need of a transplant, and that his traveling days were over. But Larry disagreed, and was intent on going back at least one more time. He’d managed to record a lot of different samples of Bayaka music, but one extremely rare instrument, the molimo, managed to elude him. Some say the molimo doesn’t even exist, but Larry was going to prove them wrong.

Before long, Larry finds himself back in Africa and is surprised to learn that much has changed. The Bayaka tribe, which had primarily lived deep in the forest, was now in a village with the Bantu people who were not particularly kind to the Bayaka. In particular, the Bantu mayor Bassoun loved to exert his power and introduce bureaucracy into everything, even going so far as to require the Bayaka people to obtain a permit in order to leave the village and enter the forest. Westerners had come in and set up a sawmill, eliminating large swaths of forest and creating all kinds of noise. If the molimo does exist, then it’s certainly not going to be found anywhere near this urbanized nightmare.

This film is based on a true story, which probably explains why it is simply a recounting of events and not so much a classic narrative. Larry’s quest is to ultimately reconnect with the Bayaka and find the molimo, but there are some half-baked side stories like Bassoun’s opposition at every turn which ultimately has no effect at all because Larry and the Bayaka simply ignore him. And there’s also a completely baffling subplot about Mr. Yi, a Chinese businessman who wants to shoot an elephant, which only briefly intersects with the story of Larry and the Bayaka, and not in any meaningful way.

I suppose on the larger scale, there is conflict of the new world versus the old and technology versus tradition, but while it is present it doesn’t really factor into the outcome. Larry does occasionally deal with health issues, and with not completely fitting in with the tribe, and not being as adept as the natives at life in the forest, but these too are all inconsequential. What’s left is just a series of things that happened to the people in the story and an ending that’s a little confusing. And yet somehow I still kind of enjoyed it.

I know it may not be a popular opinion, but I have to admit that I really like Alfred Hitchcock. I think the guy was one of the greatest directors that has ever lived, and I’ve seen an awful lot of his films. If a film markets itself with a quote like “A crime tale with twists worthy of Hitchcock”, then it’s going to have to be pretty gosh-darned spectacular just to stay out of blasphemy territory. Thin Ice is not pretty gosh-darned spectacular.

The film opens with Greg Kinnear as Mickey Prohaska as an insurance salesman with a small office in Kenosha, Wisconsin, not too far north of Chicago. He does well enough for himself professionally, mainly because he’s a complete sleazeball with no morals, but his personal life is a mess, mainly because he’s a complete sleazeball with no morals. When he learns that the parent company is going to be sending its best sales people to a conference in Aruba, he deftly poaches a promising new hire (Bob, played by David Harbour) away from one of his main competitors, only to find that Bob is an honest-to-goodness nice guy who cares about people and wants to help them instead of taking them for as much as possible. On his first outing with Mickey, Bob steered a potentially-lucrative truck driver to another agency, but then zeroed in on Gorvy (a mostly senile old man played by Alan Arkin) for a bare-bones, bottom-dollar policy.

Mickey deftly slides Bob out of the picture and manages to talk Gorvy up to a more full-featured, and full-priced, policy. As they’re finalizing the details, Mickey happens to learn that Gorvy has an old violin that he’d asked to have appraised. Mickey intercepts the results of that appraisal and learns that the violin is worth a fortune, and begins scheming about how he might acquire that violin for himself to sell at a huge profit. But as events unfold, things just keep going wrong and Mickey finds himself in ever-hotter water.

Despite the film’s praise for itself on its poster, the film doesn’t really have that many twists. Most of the time, it’s just heaping more problems onto Mickey as a direct result of his own actions. Some of these problems are things that neither Mickey nor the audience would have been able to see coming, but that still doesn’t make them twists. The only real twist comes at the end, and it’s one that is easier to spot ahead of time, and also one that the film spends way too much time explaining after the fact. It would have been far better for the film to have simply ended as soon as that twist was revealed, but it spends a good five minutes showing all of the effects that twist has on the rest of the story, and then another couple of minutes showing Mickey in its aftermath.

Until the disappointing and overly-long ending, the film is actually quite enjoyable. It’s funny and very well acted, and even when it does descend into the realm of the ridiculous, you’re having so much fun that the problems are easy to forgive. But I think that its impressive cast (which also includes Billy Crudup, Bob Balaban, and Lea Thompson) is actually its downfall, because their roles (or at least those of Crudup and Balaban) make it too easy to suspect what might be going on. It’s the kind of thing that might be suspicious on its own, but when the film just comes out and tells you that there’s going to be a twist ending, it’s almost never the case that the surprise manages to stay hidden until the big reveal.

But despite the surprise not being as surprising as the filmmakers wanted it to be, I still think that the movie could have been salvaged if it had known when to end. But the more the film stretched out its downward spiral, the harder it became to remember as a good movie.

There’s something impressive about long continuous shots in film. They’re usually not something I catch the first time through a film (at least, not if it’s any good), but they can further enhance my appreciation on subsequent passes. My love for the iconic hallway scene in Oldboy somehow found new heights to reach when I realized it was a single shot. And I managed to find new ways to love Hitchcock’s Rope when I learned that it was composed as a sequence of ten-minute shots (the amount of film that could be loaded into a camera in those days). But the first several mentions of Silent House dealt only with its being filmed in one continuous sequence, and that created something of a distraction for me because it made me watch the film more intently for possible edit points (and there are several), which prevented me from becoming as engrossed in the story.

Elizabeth Olsen and her cleavage star as Sarah, a college dropout helping her dad (John, played by Adam Trese) and uncle (Peter, played by Eric Sheffer Stevens) renovate an old house that’s been in the family for years. They’re fixing it up so they can sell it, so there are a lot of objects covered with dust cloths and construction tools lying around, and the electricity and telephone service has been disconnected. They have to light it with candles and batteries, and it’s remote enough that cell phone coverage is nonexistent, and all this makes for a pretty spooky place. It’s also not very fun when John and Peter get into an argument and Peter drives off into town for some time away.

Shortly after Peter leaves, Sarah starts to hear noises upstairs, but her father is working on the ground floor. At first, he dismisses it the normal cracking and creaking of an old house, or maybe rats, but she persists in her claims and they go to investigate. Their cursory look through the upstairs finds nothing, but the noises persist and she becomes even more convinced there’s someone else in the house. But when she finds her dad lying unconscious on the floor with a bloody face, there’s no more room for doubt.

I’m not entirely sure why the film is called Silent House, since hearing noises where there aren’t supposed to be any people is part of what’s supposed to make it scary. I have to confess that I didn’t find any parts of the film particularly scary, but that’s at least in part because I was more focused than usual on trying to identify potential cuts and less engrossed in the story. However, given that the film doesn’t really show us anything new, I’m not sure that any hardened horror fan would find much of the film even remotely frightening. The ending is something that we’ve seen before, and the movie ultimately paints itself into a corner where there isn’t much room for alternatives, so it’s something that you’ll probably see coming in advance, but they do at least try to throw in some red herrings along the way.

In addition to distracting my focus from the action, the attempt to present the film as a single continuous shot is harmful because it results in action which is occasionally jarring (because whoever is carrying the camera is bouncing quite a bit, making for a very unstable image), and there were several occasions in which it was at least briefly out of focus. Further, there were a couple of cases in which the camera follows Sarah into a relatively small space, and there is some unnatural movement required (both from Sarah and from the perspective of the camera) in order to get out of that space without the need to cut.

It seems that Silent House is yet another casualty of the gimmick that gets in the way. Like found footage and 3D and CGI and similar audiovisual elements, if the gimmick is intended to make up for a weak story or interferes with the way that story is experienced, then the gimmick needs to go.

Hollywood movies have some pretty hard and fast rules when it comes to relationships between men and women. If a woman ever gets nauseous, it’s because she’s pregnant. If a man has lots of meaningless sex, then his life will be just as meaningless. And if a man and a woman are best friends, then they’re going to have sex and make things awkward.

In this year’s version of that story, those best friends are Julie (Jennifer Westfeldt, who also wrote and directed the film) and Jason (Adam Scott, playing a character very similar to his last role in Our Idiot Brother). They’re nearly inseparable, but there’s no sexual tension between them, allowing them to sleep with whomever they want and share the details with each other. They’re also friends with two married couples, Leslie and Alex (Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd) and Missy and Ben (Kristen Wiig and Jon Hamm), and they all have lots of fun together. But that all changes when the married couples start to have kids, and those kids start to dominate their lives.

On the one hand, Jason and Julie see what their friends’ lives have become are glad they don’t have to deal with this. On the other, Julie’s biological clock is ticking and she doesn’t feel like she’ll be able to have a truly great relationship with a man with the pressure of her wanting a baby hanging over them. So of course the best solution for this problem is to have a baby first and then go looking for Mr. Right. And Jason is right there for her and vows he’ll be totally committed in his role as baby daddy.

The basic story is one that’s been told many times before, and usually as a comedy, so there aren’t too many surprises lurking in Friends with Kids. I’d say the biggest surprise for me was just how inconsistent the comedy was, with long stretches that didn’t seem to attempt any humor at all, and several of the comedic scenes not having their intended effect. I’d heard a lot of comparisons made to the 2011 smash hit Bridesmaids, but other than sharing a few of the main characters (Wiig, Hamm, Rudolph, and O’Dowd), there’s not a whole lot of commonality. What comedy there is in the film exists primarily between Westfeldt and Scott, and Wiig and Hamm were largely unfunny and generally disruptive to the overall flow of the movie. The film would have been stronger if the characters played by Wiig and Hamm had been cut out completely, as the purpose they serve is largely duplicated by the characters played by Rudolph and O’Dowd, and the latter couple was much less unenjoyable.

Removing Wiig and Hamm would have also helped cut down on the film’s runtime, which is about fifteen minutes too long. Removing the weaker characters and concentrating the comedy would’ve resulted in a much more fun 90-minute film. But the predictable plot and inevitable conclusion make all the flaws in Friends with Kids more readily apparent and harder to overlook.