Why Him?

The director and co-writer of Why Him? is John Hamburg, who is best known for writing Meet the Parents and its two Focker sequels.  I bring this up, because he is essentially stealing from himself here.  He once again is doing a comedy about the generational gap as a group of people come together for a family bonding weekend.  However, he apparently felt that if he added a whole bunch of "F-Bombs" and gross out gags involving a dead moose preserved in a tank full of urine, it would make things more interesting.  He was wrong.

Here is yet another fairly desperate example of what I can only describe as "feel good smut".  Why Him? wants to shock us by including pretty much every curse word under the sun and having them used repeatedly to the point that you think the cast were getting paid extra for each time they slipped one into their dialogue.  But then, it also wants us to fall in love with these characters, so it gets all soft and gooey at the end, and wraps up with everybody getting together for Christmas and singing carols.  I fail to see the appeal of this approach, yet Hollywood keeps on doing it.  If you want to make a hard and edgy comedy, go all the way.  Don't cop out and end things with a sparkle in the eye and a message of family togetherness.  I have nothing against movies wanting to end on a happy note, but when you build your movie around your main characters behaving like foulmouthed jerks, and then end with them with their arms around each other in Yuletide glee, it just comes across as being unconvincing.  The movie has not earned its feel good ending.

The movie stars Bryan Cranston as the stern and uptight father of a Stanford University senior (Zoey Deutch from Everybody Wants Some!), and James Franco as the goofy and far-too-eager to please man who wants to marry Cranston's daughter.  The rivalry and eventual relationship between these two men is what drives the screenplay.  It drives it so much that the women in this movie are pretty much ignored for the entire running time.  The daughter is more or less treated as a prop who usually stands in the background while her father and boyfriend exchange dialogue.  Sometimes she gets a private moment with each of the two stars, but they don't amount to anything.  Megan Mullally, who plays Cranston's wife, is given even less to do.  Heck, the movie goes so far as to shortchange her character.  Much of the movie is built around the fact that Franco wants to marry the daughter, but won't do so unless he gets Cranston's blessing.  Not once does he even talk to the mother about this, nor does he ever ask for her blessing.

Cranston plays Ned Fleming, the longtime owner of a printing business that is about to go broke.  When his daughter falls for Franco's Laird Mayhew, Ned, his wife, and his teenage son Scotty (Griffin Gluck) fly to California to meet him.  Turns out Laird is a tech billionaire and the mind behind a highly successful series of video games and apps.  He lives in a massive house overlooking Silicon Valley, which is littered with various pieces of pornographic art, which the film constantly makes references to, as if it thinks we don't get the joke.  His house also is filled with various friends, co-workers, celebrity chefs and the occasional farm animal.  He has a high-tech Japanese toilet, a very nosy and intrusive Siri-like computer device (voice by Kaley Cuoco), and a right-hand man named Gustav (Keegan-Michael Key) who more or less runs things both around the home and in Laird's personal life.

Why Him? doesn't really have anything to say about the lavish lifestyle Laird leads, nor does it make much of a satirical effort.  Instead, the movie plays the same one note over and over for its comedy.  Laird is far too eager to please, often goes too far in trying to impress his girlfriend's family, and constantly uses obscenities when he talks.  Ned is stressed, thinks the guy is a doofus, and doesn't want him anywhere near his little girl.  Once you understand this simple concept, you have the whole movie, which repeats this idea over and over until the end credits decide to show up far later than they should have. (This movie runs nearly two hours, when a slight 80 minutes or so would have sufficed.) These characters and the performances that both Cranston and Franco give are so repetitive, I found myself exhausted.  I didn't like either one, and didn't exactly care which side the daughter was going to take by the end.

There have been much worse comedies than this in 2016, but Why Him? is yet another example of lazy, assembly line Hollywood filmmaking.  Nobody tried to buck the trend or attempt something different here.  They just threw in a lot of four letter words, and hoped audiences would respond with gales of laughter.  If it were really that easy, Andrew Dice Clay would still be selling out arenas.

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