Meeting the parents, coming to dinner, crossing paths with prospective in-laws: when a person introduces their significant other to the people that brought them into the world, hijinks ensue. At least, that’s the tale filmmakers keep telling audiences — and one in particular. After sharing scripting duties on Meet the Parents and its two sequels, John Hamburg directs his fourth addition to the awkward family genre, Why Him?
That titular question is designed to sit on the tip of viewers’ tongues from the moment Michigan paper factory owner Ned Fleming (Bryan Cranston, The Infiltrator) first encounters rich video gaming entrepreneur Laird Mayhew (James Franco, TV’s 11.22.63). One is careful, protective and technology-adverse; the other loud, erratic and unfiltered, relying on both cloud-based and flesh-and-blood assistants (the former voiced by The Big Bang Theory’s Kaley Cuoco, the latter played by Keanu’s Keegan-Michael Key) to keep his life in order. Predictably, Ned instantly disapproves of Laird, and can’t understand what his college student daughter Stephanie (Zoey Deutch, Everybody Wants Some!!) sees in him. Just as unsurprisingly, Laird is eager to impress his new potential patriarch, though his attempts don’t go smoothly.
It should sound as though you’ve seen the film Hamburg co-wrote with Ian Helfer (The Oranges) before, regardless of the fact that it’s based on War Dogs actor Jonah Hill’s own nerves upon meeting a girlfriend’s father (with Hill receiving a story credit). While the specific gags change, the broad strokes of every seen-before, sitcom-style, meet-the-parents fare typically stay the same. Ned’s wife Barb (Megan Mullally, You, Me and the Apocalypse) and 15-year-old son Scotty (Griffin Gluck, Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life) are much more amenable to Laird’s big-spending, big-hearted gestures and eccentric ways, causing more tension. Stephanie tries to encourage her father to see the other side of her boyfriend, but her pleas only push the two further apart.
Two men fight, one woman stands between them, and Why Him? becomes the latest slickly packaged example of competitive male antics turned into supposedly comic entertainment. Macho posturing of the ostensibly romantic or paternal kind became common cinema fodder long ago; however, combined with Hamburg’s penchant for over-the-top gags, swearing as the height of hilarity, and easy Silicon Valley and hipster satire, it proves even more clumsy and uncomfortable. And, along with stressing cultural differences in bathroom appliances for laughs, it’s also the film’s undoing. From the central duo’s behaviour to their dialogue, most of the feature’s lewd, crude, clash-oriented contents are exaggerated to the point of expected ridiculousness — with Key and Mullally capturing Why Him?’s brand of comedy best — but trying to justify Ned and Laird’s bickering, stupidity and obnoxiousness through their need to be the main man in Stephanie’s life is ill-thought-out at best and offensive at worst.
It mightn’t seem like it, but Why Him? didn’t necessarily have to be this way. The generational conflict, the way fathers and son-in-laws interact, the difficulties of older workers in coping with all things modern and young (and therefore facing the future that’s rendering them obsolete) — while there is little that’s new in these ponderings, here they’re absent any trace of depth, and simply used as shorthand to explain Ned and Laird’s battle. In an over-extended and needlessly repetitive effort, Cranston and Franco try to range beyond stereotypes, stupidity and sexism, selling their adversarial relationship as well as their characters’ flaws and vulnerabilities, only to be sabotaged by the scarcely passable material. That said, they’re given more opportunity than Deutch, who is perfectly fine in her role, but plays a part that couldn’t be more blandly and flimsily written. Of course, when men go head-to-head over a woman in a humour-driven movie, the fact that’s she’s a person is too-often treated as irrelevant — and that remains the case even if the film in question clearly knows it.
Rating: 2 stars out of 5
Why Him?
Director: John Hamburg
US, 2016, 111 mins
Release date: 26 December
Distributor: Fox
Rated: MA
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