Trailer, via Warner Bros..
We’re the Millers: A Road Trip With Two Tons of Weed and Nothing Else
We’re the Millers arrived on August 7, 2013, from Warner Bros. Pictures. Rawson Marshall Thurber directed. Four writers share screenplay credit — Bob Fisher, Steve Faber, Sean Anders and John Morris — working from a story by Fisher and Faber. Jennifer Aniston, Jason Sudeikis, Emma Roberts, Will Poulter, Nick Offerman, Kathryn Hahn, Molly Quinn and Ed Helms filled out the cast. The film runs 110 minutes.
It premiered at the Traverse City Film Festival on August 3, 2013, four days before its wide release. It made $270 million worldwide against a $37 million budget. It won two MTV Movie Awards out of six nominations and picked up four People’s Choice Award nominations. None of that is the same thing as being good.
David Clark and the Debt He Cannot Pay
Sudeikis plays David Clark, a low-level marijuana dealer in Denver. He gets robbed — money and stash, some of which he owes his supplier, Brad Gurdlinger, played by Ed Helms. Gurdlinger is a college acquaintance, which is the kind of detail the film treats as a joke and never bothers to make funny.
Gurdlinger forces David to smuggle marijuana from Mexico to clear the debt. That is the engine. A man with no leverage gets a job he cannot refuse.
The plan requires cover. David realizes that crossing customs alone would look suspicious, so he hires his neighbors. Rose, a stripper working under a stage name, played by Aniston. Casey, a local runaway, played by Roberts. Kenny, a naïve teenager recently abandoned, played by Poulter. They pose as his wife, daughter and son. They call themselves the Millers. That is the entire con: four strangers performing a family for border agents.
Two Tons, Not a Smidge
At the compound in Mexico, the Millers learn the load is not “a smidge,” which is how Gurdlinger described it. It is two tons. That single reversal — the bait-and-switch from manageable crime to impossible crime — is the film’s best structural idea, and it arrives early. Everything after it is the movie failing to build on the one thing it got right.
They get stopped by authorities twice. They get through on bribery and luck. Neither stop produces a set piece worth remembering. The RV breaks down because of the extra weight: a radiator hose fails.
The Fitzgeralds — Don, Edie and daughter Melissa, played by Offerman, Hahn and Quinn — catch up to them and tow them to a repair shop. The Fitzgeralds are a real family on a real vacation, and the Millers had met them at the border. Then the film tells us Don is a DEA agent. The Millers are alarmed. The audience should be too, but the film never lets the threat breathe. It is a complication, not a crisis.
Kissing Lessons and the Incest Joke
Kenny develops a crush on Melissa. He admits he has never kissed a girl. Casey and Rose give him kissing lessons while David films it. Melissa walks in and assumes the family is incestuous.
That is the joke. That is where the film goes. It is not edgy in any way that costs the filmmakers anything — it is a misunderstanding that exists to be cleared up, and the movie treats the audience’s discomfort as the payoff. Roberts and Aniston play it straight. Poulter plays it wide-eyed.
The scene is not the problem. The problem is that the film has nothing else in the chamber.
Pablo Chacon and the Stolen Shipment
Gurdlinger lied. The marijuana was stolen from cartel boss Pablo Chacon, played by Tomer Sisley. The next day, when the Millers return to the shop for the RV, Chacon and his henchman One-Eye, played by Matthew Willig, are waiting. Chacon prepares to kill them.
The Millers disclose they are not a real family and did not know they were stealing from him. Rose gets a chance to prove she is a stripper by dancing in her underwear. When she gets close to Chacon, she turns a steam vent on him. The Millers escape in the RV.
Luis Guzmán appears as a Mexican cop. Thomas Lennon appears as Rick Nathanson. These are names in a cast list, not characters. The film has a deep bench and gives almost all of it one scene, one gag, one exit.
The Cast the Script Does Not Deserve
Aniston is the film’s most reliable asset. Rose is written as a stripper with a stage name and not much else, but Aniston gives her a flat, unimpressed competence that the script never earns. Sudeikis is doing the thing he does — the fast, needling, slightly pathetic guy who talks his way through problems. It works in bursts. It does not hold a 110-minute movie together.
Poulter is the film’s real find. Kenny is written as a punchline, a teenager who has never been kissed, and Poulter plays him with enough sincerity that the character briefly becomes a person. Offerman and Hahn are given a DEA agent and his wife, and they play them as a couple who have clearly been married too long and are enjoying the break. Every scene with the Fitzgeralds is better than every scene without them. That is not a compliment to the film. It is a mark of how badly the film misjudges where its own strengths are.
Emma Roberts gets the least to do. Casey is a runaway, which is a fact the movie states and never investigates. She exists to deliver the kissing-lesson scene and to be the daughter in the photograph.
A Comedy That Forgets to Be Funny
The reviews were mixed. The box office was not. We’re the Millers grossed $270 million worldwide on a $37 million budget, which means the film was a success by every measure that matters to a studio. That is the fact that explains why this movie exists and why its compromises are what they are.
The film is a road comedy with a crime plot bolted on. It has a fake family, a real cartel, a DEA agent in an RV, and two tons of marijuana. That is enough premise for three movies. We’re the Millers uses it for one long joke about a family that is not a family, and then it runs out of road.
The plot follows a small-time pot dealer (Sudeikis) who convinces his neighbors to help him by pretending to be his family in order to smuggle drugs from Mexico into the United States.
That is the logline. The film never gets past it. Every scene is the logline restated with a different prop. The RV breaks down. The RV gets towed. The RV gets stopped. The RV escapes. The movie is a series of obstacles that exist to be survived, not to be funny.
The tagline is “If anyone asks.” It is a good tagline for a movie that never asks itself the harder question: what is this family, actually, to each other by the end? The film gestures at warmth in its final act — the Millers have become a unit, the lie has become a kind of truth — but it does not earn the turn. It announces it. The characters like each other because the screenplay needs them to, not because anything between them changed.
The kissing-lesson scene is the clearest evidence. It is the film’s biggest swing at transgression, and it is resolved in a single beat of misunderstanding. Nothing is at stake. Nobody learns anything. The scene exists because the filmmakers thought it would be funny, and it is not funny enough to justify the space it takes up.
What works: Poulter, Offerman, Hahn, and the two-ton reveal. What does not: nearly everything built around them. The cartel subplot is inert. The DEA agent is a wasted asset. The romance between Kenny and Melissa goes nowhere the film is willing to follow.
The ending is a shrug, and that is the part that lingers. We’re the Millers had a premise that could have carried a meaner, tighter comedy, and it chose instead to be pleasant. Pleasant is the one thing this material could not survive. The $270 million is real. So is the 4.4 out of 10.
The Numbers
- Release date: August 7, 2013
- Premiere: Traverse City Film Festival, August 3, 2013
- Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
- Director: Rawson Marshall Thurber
- Runtime: 110 minutes
- Budget: $37 million
- Worldwide gross: $270 million
- Metacritic: 44/100
- Score: 4.4 of 10
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