Seen it all before

Rating: 1/10 (20 November 2015)

Formulaic 'comedy' very much in the style of The Way Way Back (which seems to bit a bit zeitgeist at the moment) in these sense that it presents us with characters that are mildly objectionable that we are 'supposed' to dislike but of course can't help ourselves really because they all turn out to be so lovable and give us that false sense of having witnessed character development by the end of the film when they all turn out to be completely different from how we expected even though of course this is a fallacy because it's so tame, so unoriginal and so formulaic that we aren't hoodwinked for a second so the satisfaction of unexpectedly seeing bad guys turn good is removed from the start. In Millers, the characters we are given are; the moral 40-year old drug dealer (he doesn't sell to kids you know), the hard-faced 40-year old stripper who actually turns out to be really nice (surprise, surprise), the homeless girl (with a mobile phone no less) who is actually revealed to be really pretty and intelligent and the geeky virgin teen boy that is supposed to strike a chord with the maternal instincts in its female audience and be a character for the jocks in the audience to laugh at. A series of situations and mishaps occur much in the vein of any modern Hollywood comedy. While the situations themselves may be new, the characters, style and overall storyline certainly are not and we've seen it all before. I admit it raised a few laughs a points but it's one of those films where, even if the odd scene or two are quite funny, at about half way through you wonder why you are wasting your time. I couldn't even watch it to the end. Who on earth could be fooled by such formulaic nonsense you may wonder? Yet it achieves a score of 7.1 out of 10 on IMDb (at the time of writing).