It’s my experience that we all choose our families. Sometimes they are relationships of blood (hej hej the Cuffs), but sometimes they’re not who we’re born with but rather they are families magicked together out of friendship or sex or shared experience or even of necessity. So I totally get the basic premise of We’re The Millers – finding your true family is a wondrous thing. It takes a while to get there though….
In We’re The Millers, Jason Sudeikis plays David, a self-absorbed, small-time Denver pot dealer who’s forced to make a drug run into Mexico on behalf of a gleefully amoral narcissist. To get through the border there and back, he enlists the help of a spunky teenage runaway, a geeky naif and the proverbial stripper with a heart of gold (Jennifer Anniston) to fake the happy all-American Miller family. Thus ensues an R-rated comedy that’s partly genius, partly stomach-cringing crass, partly funny, partly embarassing – but ultimately it’s saved from its gross-outs (I’m about 30 years too old for all the cock and vagina jokes) by a genuine affection for the mismatched protagonists.
Denver isn’t Denver of course, it’s Wilmington, and Mexico is New Mexico, but what can you do?