Why Him?

A mostly interminable experience, Why Him? follows Bryan Cranston’s Ned Fleming as he and his wife (Megan Mullally’s Barb) travel across the country to meet their college-age daughter’s (Zoey Deutch’s Stephanie) older new boyfriend (James Franco’s Laird) – with the movie subsequently revolving around the tedious clash that ensues between the uptight Ned and the freewheeling Laird. It’s apparent right from the opening scene that Why Him? is operating at a level of sub-sitcom quality, as the movie, which kicks off with a disastrously unfunny Skype sequence, suffers from a series of desperate, laugh-free interludes that seem to have been improvised by the various performers – with, for example, a scene detailing Ned’s encounter with a Japanese toilet scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel from start to finish. Beyond the movie’s misguided sense of humor, however, Why Him? suffers from a dearth of compelling elements and plausible characters – with, in terms of the latter, Franco’s Laird undoubtedly the sort of figure that could only exist in a lowest-common-denominator picture like this. It’s all just so tedious and slowly-paced; there’s absolutely no momentum at play here, and it remains completely (and consistently) impossible to work up an ounce of interest in the wafer-thin narrative’s eye-rollingly broad happenings – with the movie, on top of everything else, concluding with an absolutely endless final stretch that might just be worse than everything preceding it. Why Him? is ultimately a total trainwreck that wastes the considerable talent of its various performers, and it is, in the end, impossible not to wonder just what filmmaker John Hamburg originally set out to do with this abomination.

1/2* out of ****