Shockingly over-rated.

Rating: 2/10 (27 May 2012)

Watched this over-rated dud last night. It's "National Lampoon's Vacation" as if directed by Wes Anderson's dumber brother.
It's a lame family roadtrip comedy dressed in a thin veneer of phony indie quirkiness. It's dumb and glib with pretensions of intelligence and depth, flattering gullible audiences into liking it. The characters are one-dimensional sitcom stereotypes who don't act or re-act remotely like real people. The writers directly cribbed the Aunt Edna scene from "Vacation", for God's sake, and the directors cynically cribbed the vaguely-'70s-looking-but-it's-not production design from any random indie comedy of the last ten years. Worst of all, the ending of the movie completely missed the point. The only reason it succeeded at all was a very good cast who made a little bit of chicken salad out of... well, you know.
There are some genuinely funny scenes and dialog, but I was so offended by its naked and unwarranted pretensions that it irritated me into hating it more than I would have if it had just presented itself as the minor cut-above-a-sitcom flick that it is. It's as edgy, clever and fresh as "Sister Act."