A&E

Film review: ‘We’re the Millers’

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We’re the Millers stars Jason Sudeikis, Jennifer Aniston, Emma Roberts and Will Poulter as a group of people posing as a family to smuggle marijuana into the U.S.

Two stars

We're the Millers Jason Sudeikis, Jennifer Aniston, Emma Roberts, Will Poulter. Directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber. Rated R. Now playing.

You can tell what kind of movie We’re the Millers is when it ventures into the workplace of one of its main characters. Rose (Jennifer Aniston) works in the kind of movie strip club where dancers are never wearing less than lingerie, and for all its R-rated profanity and gross-out gags, Millers is a fundamentally timid, conservative movie. Rose joins small-time drug dealer David (Jason Sudeikis), teenage runaway Casey (Emma Roberts) and pathologically upbeat loser Kenny (Will Poulter) to pose as a wholesome family on vacation in order to smuggle a massive shipment of marijuana across the U.S.-Mexico border. Things, of course, do not go as planned, and while that sometimes leads to amusing misunderstandings, it more often leads to disingenuous lesson learning and emotional growth. After an irreverent (if only sporadically funny) first act that seems determined to give the finger to family-bonding clichés, Millers then proceeds to embrace every single one of them.

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