The Joneses

Though it fizzles out in a fairly pronounced way as it progresses, The Joneses boasts an agreeable opening half hour that’s consistently held aloft by its surprisingly inventive premise. The movie concerns a seemingly normal nuclear family, Steve (David Duchovny), Kate (Demi Moore), Mick (Ben Hollingsworth), and Jenn (Amber Heard), who, as it turns out, are actually a foursome of stealth marketers, with their task to infiltrate a wealthy neighborhood and surreptitiously convince its various residents to buy a series of high-end (and not-so-high-end) products. It’s an outlandish yet thoroughly compelling set-up that’s initially employed to promising effect by writer/director Derrick Borte, as the filmmaker effectively establishes the various characters and their ongoing efforts at selling their assigned products. The uniformly stirring performances certainly go a long way towards cementing the affable atmosphere, with Duchovny’s expectedly charismatic work certainly standing as a highlight within the proceedings (Moore is also quite good, while Gary Cole, cast as the family’s next-door neighbor, steals every one of his scant scenes). It’s a shame, then, that Borte eventually places an increasingly prominent emphasis on elements of a decidedly melodramatic nature, as the various characters slow-but-surely find themselves confronted with problems and concerns of a lamentably soap opera-esque nature (eg the son grapples with his homosexuality, the daughter embarks on an affair with a married man, etc). By the time Duchovny’s character delivers his climactic speech decrying materialism, one can’t help but think that the film has seriously gone off the rails somewhere along the line. Still, The Joneses is generally a watchable piece of work that, if nothing else, stands as further proof that Duchovny deserves to be a much, much bigger star than he currently is.

**1/2 out of ****