Another wandering ‘comedy’

FILM REVIEW

Wanderlust
DIRECTED BY: David Wain
STARRING: Paul Rudd, Jennifer Aniston, Justin Theroux, Alan Alda
CERT: 16

IT was only last week I was talking about Jennifer Aniston and her unfortunate knack for lending her talents to bad movies.
So I must extend my thanks to director David Wain for providing a fine illustration of this strange phenomenon. As an added bonus, his film is also an example of how the excellent Paul Rudd can make even the worst film almost bearable. That he does it on a regular basis for lame Judd Apatow productions like this should win him some award.
Rudd and Aniston are George and Linda, an ambitious pair who’ve just bought themselves a small but very expensive New York apartment. Soon after, George loses his corporate job and Linda learns that HBO are not interested in her documentary about penguins with testicular cancer.
Up the financial creek, they leave the city and head for Atlanta, to live with George’s obnoxious brother Rick (co-writer Ken Marino) and his muttering, medicated wife (Michaela Watkins).
Life in this household and at Rick’s portaloo business, where George joins the staff, turns out to be Dante’s forgotten level of hell, so the couple end up moving into a hippie commune called Elysium. Free love reigns, no boundaries exist, and camp leader Seth (Theroux) presides over the standard bunch of dopeheads, philosophers and mother earth airheads. There is also the resident nudist and, obviously, the handy availability of hallucinogenic drugs. The acid, of course, gives the screenwriters a chance to lob in the old R Kelly gag. After all these years, it still isn’t funny.
The film as a whole has its moments, but the few good laughs don’t make it worth the while. The hippie target is old and worn out at this stage and the lazy writing doesn’t bring anything new to the campfire, apart from added male nudity and vulgar language. Which can be funny under the right conditions but in the Apatow stable, vulgarity is not an accessory to comedy, it is route one, the long ball over the top, bypassing the hard work in midfield.
It’s the Rory Delap throw, which will get you the odd goal but as Arsene Wenger might put it, it’s just an ugly way of doing things.
Paul Rudd, as usual, does his best to make it almost watchable, but he deserves better than to be wasting his time on junk like this.
Aniston does too, but seems doomed to squander her gifts in this terrible movie purgatory she can’t escape from.
Alan Alda, meanwhile, turns up as the commune founder and doesn’t get much to do other than remind us how far comedy can fall and to remind me why I’d rather watch M*A*S*H re-runs than go to the cinema.

This Means War
DIRECTED BY: McG
STARRING: Reese Witherspoon, Tom Hardy, Chris Pine
CERT: 15A

THERE are bad movies, there are silly movies, there are exceptionally dumb movies. Then there are movies like This Is War, films so stupid they defy description within the confines of human language.
If language absolutely must be used, a long string of strong curse words is the only thing that comes close to a satisfactory assessment. But since the Rory Delap approach is out of the question here, let me just give a brief rundown, a very pale hint of its badness.
Reese Witherspoon is a fine single woman who meets two fine men through an online dating service. Unknown to her, these two boys, Tom Hardy and Chris Pine, are best friends. Also unknown to her, they are CIA agents. They share an office, they work missions together, taking down villains like their latest target, Til Schweiger, a big German whose chief skill is the menacing European stare.
Now that the lads are love rivals, all that silly international intelligence stuff goes on the back burner as they compete for the lovely lady, using every expensive gadget and illegal surveillance trick in the book to out-do each other.
Reese, of course, has a worldly-wise girlfriend advising her every move. The boys have director McG in their corner, pumping the macho up to eleven and putting them through a gazillion bad action scenes, as is his method.
The film is presented as a romantic comedy, by people who seem unaware that such a thing requires two very basic ingredients, romance and laughs. And I’m going to leave it at that because I can feel my inner Rory winding up to let fly. And we don’t want that.