Hall Pass

Though The Heartbreak Kid seemed to mark an obvious low point for the Farrelly brothers, Hall Pass ultimately manages to surpass its immediate predecessor in terms of negative attributes – as the film primarily comes off as an unfunny, aggressively desperate, and flat-out boring comedy that cements the filmmaking siblings’ complete and total irrelevance. The movie, which follows two sleazy friends (Owen Wilson’s Rick and Jason Sudeikis’ Fred) as they receive permission from their long-suffering wives (Jenna Fischer’s Maggie and Christina Applegate’s Grace) to cheat during a one-week period, has been suffused with a sitcom-like feel that’s evident in everything from the rote performances to the puerile screenplay to the flat visuals, with the eye-rollingly simplistic treatment of the various characters (ie men are pigs and women are shrill harpies) immediately establishing a lowest-common-denominator-type atmosphere that persists right through to the unjustifiably sentimental finish. Hall Pass‘ many, many problems are exacerbated by its astonishing lack of laughs, as the Farrellys offer up one hopelessly misguided comedic set-piece after another (eg Fred picks up a girl with explosive diarrhea) – which certainly proves effective in establishing and perpetuating the film’s aggressively interminable feel. The end result is a pathetically misguided and pervasively low-rent endeavor that has little to offer even the most open-minded of viewers, and it’s ultimately rather difficult to believe that the movie is from the same two men responsible for such bona fide comedy classics as Dumb and Dumber and Kingpin.

1/2* out of ****