HIGHWAY TO HELL (WE'RE THE MILLERS)

About 13 years ago, the American Film Institute produced its list of the 100 best Hollywood comedies.

The list was impressive.

Billy Wilder's 'Some Like It Hot' was deservedly on top.

The top 10 was rounded out by Sydney Pollack's 'Tootsie', Stanley Kubrick's 'Dr Strangelove', Woody Allen's 'Annie Hall', Leo McCarey's Marx Brothers movie 'Duck Soup', Mel Brooks' 'Blazing Saddles', Robert Altman's 'M*A*S*H*', Frank Capra's 'It Happened One Night', Mike Nichols' 'The Graduate' and Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker's 'Airplane'.

As most of the directors, writers and actors on the list would, no doubt, have testified, a good comedy is like a tightrope walk. It is notoriously difficult to pull off and it requires a deft touch.

Lately, it would appear Hollywood has lost that deft comic touch.

In the 13 years since the AFI published its list, you could argue only two US comedies would be worthy contenders to make a revised top 100. 

Both were road movies - Alexander Payne's 'Sideways' and Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton's 'Little Miss Sunshine' and both were indie comedies.

For the most part, going to see a mainstream Hollywood studio comedy over the past 13 years has increasingly felt like a chore.

Comedy movies are overhyped, overacted and over the top, with each studio marketing machine declaring every month they have "the funniest film since 'Bridesmaids' (or 'The Hangover')" etc.

In an era of 'Ted', 'Borat' and 'Knocked Up', the subtlety of Keaton, Wilder and Woody Allen has given way to the brash, loudmouth, shock tactics of the Farrellys, Seth MacFarlane and Todd Phillips.

For classy and stimulating American humour, you have to turn these days to the small screen and watch sitcoms like 'Modern Family', '30 Rock' and reruns of 'Frasier'.

Movie comedies can be cash cows for Hollywood studios. 

They are much cheaper to make and easier to make a profit than the rash of superhero movies that has broken out in our multiplexes.

But far too often these days, they fall woefully short of Hollywood's great comedy tradition.

The latest comedy from Warner Brothers is 'We're the Millers' with Saturday Night Live's Jason Sudeikis and Jennifer Anniston.

It's a road movie about a fake family that is meant to evoke memories of 'Little Miss Sunshine' but more in the vein of 'The Hangover'.

Director Rawson Marshall Thurber and his screenwriting committee of Bob Fisher, Steve Faber, John Morris and Sean Anders no doubt believe they have produced an anarchic studio comedy.

But in reality, 'We're the Millers' is a road movie engaged in a race to the bottom. It feeds off puerile white American racist and sexist stereotypes and manages to be sometimes bland and sometimes offensive.

Set in Denver, Sudeikis plays a pot dealing slacker in his 30s called David, who lives in the same apartment block as Anniston's weary stripper Rose and Will Poulter's gormless nerdy teenager, Kenny.

When Kenny and David try to prevent a gang from mugging a street teen, the drug dealer ends up being robbed of his stash and his cash.

And so David is forced by Ed Helms' oily corporate drug kingpin Brad Gurdlinger to take on a job that will see him go over the border to Mexico and con a criminal gang into handing him a substantial consignment of marijuana.

David turns to Rose, Kenny and Emma Roberts' tough talking teen street kid Casey to pose as his fake family, the Millers, on an RV trip to get the drugs.

The plan, of course, backfires.

The Mexican drug cartel realises it has been conned and pursues David and his fake family.

Within minutes of leaving the gang's compound, the Millers encounter a corrupt gay Mexican cop (Luis Guzman) and along the way home meet another family in an RV whose parents might be swingers and whose father (Nick Offerman) happens to be in the DEA.

The writing, directing and acting in 'We're The Millers' is spectacularly lazy.

The director and screenwriters think they can wring cheap laughs out of embarrassingly vulgar dialogue about fellatio, a prosthetics gag about a spider biting a teenager's testicles and by engaging in tired sexist and racist stereotypes (particularly about Mexicans).  

Anniston, an iffy and overrated comic actress even when she was in the sitcom 'Friends', is hopelessly miscast as Rose and is expected to perform a demeaning striptease halfway through the film, presumably to cater for the tastes of lads mags audiences.

Sudeikis, in his first lead role, turns in an insipid performance.

Helms is woefully hammy as the chief villain.

Roberts, like Anniston, is out of her depth.

Only English actor Will Poulter, who audiences may remember from 'Son of Rambow', emerges with any credit but is subjected to the indignity of wearing prosthetic swollen testicles.

Poorly written, boringly crafted, this movie was so weak, I actually found myself rooting for the drug gang to capture the Millers.

Will Marshall's comedy do well at the box office?

Unfortunately, it already has in the US.

But if audiences really want to engage their brains and see a subversive, inventive, darkly comic tale of drug dealers, they should check out AMC's 'Breaking Bad' with Bryan Cranston on TV, Netflix or DVD.

Don't waste your time with this rubbish.

Come back Billy Wilder and Groucho Marx. 

We need your intelligence, your wit because we're on the cinematic highway to Hell.

('We're the Millers' opened in Movie House cinemas in Northern Ireland and other UK and Irish cinemas on August 23, 2013. This review originally appeared on Eamonnmallie.com)