On a recent trip to River Cinema for a free movie night, a group of friends and I settled on the brand new James Franco/Bryan Cranston flick, Why Him?. In our defense, this was by no means our first choice. La La Land was sold out and the next movie didn’t start for another hour at least. So, we said why not? Franco and Cranston are both good actors and generally make good movies or shows so it can’t be that bad.
The movie starts off with one of the most forced attempts to relate to teens I have ever seen in my entire life. It was worse than any of those bad dad videos on Twitter. Franco, otherwise known as “Laird” (because that’s such a hip name today), is FaceTiming his girlfriend, Steph, and saying how they are going to. . . “Netflix and Chill” and how he has "the worst blue balls ever". Yay, hip new terms!
At this point, the friend who threw out the idea of seeing this turned to us all and simply apologized. As the movie continues, it relies on simplistic jokes that can be seen coming from a mile away. The mom who is behind the times but gets swept up in it, swearing at children, parents seeing their children in unfortunately sexual scenes, and, of course, toilet humor.
Literally toilet humor.
The little film critic buff in me also couldn’t get over the terrible acting in the movie too. Many of the actor’s including Franco and Cranston, look like they couldn’t believe they’re making jokes that are this bad. The movie itself had plenty of star power, but it was all people who hadn’t been in a movie lately and probably just needed some extra spending money for it. Try to find the outtakes for the movie, it doesn’t exist. There’s just behind-the-scenes of filming where the actors can get through their lines and look bored doing it.
One of the main characters, Gustav, has his moments. Even then, the audience seemed to simply think everything he said was funny because he had an accent and, of course because he was played by everyone’s favorite “funnyman” Keegan Michael Key.
The one highlight of the film was a small cameo played by Workaholics, Adam Devine, but that scene lasted maybe three minutes in an almost two-hour movie. So, mathematically, I was laughing for maybe three percent of this “comedy”.
I quickly noticed the amount of advertising inside the movie as well. The entire thing must have been paid for by big companies such as Apple, Applebee’s, Pepsi, Pop-Tarts, Netflix, and probably dozens other that I missed.
Normally, I wouldn’t judge someone for enjoying a movie because everyone has a right to their own opinion, but this is legitimately just a bad film. The jokes are bad. The actors phone it in. Half of the movie is just advertisements for companies.
After the movie ended, we all walked out and exchanged looks of disbelief as we didn’t know a movie could be that horrendous. After we were done ragging on it, I remembered a friend had mentioned that they loved the movie, and so texts were exchanged in which his only defense to why do you like such an awful movie was, “I have a middle school sense of humor”. So please, unless you have a middle school (or lower) sense of humor, don’t go see Why Him?.
