Review: Hall Pass

The long-standing marriages of Owen Wilson and Jenna Fischer, and Jason Sudeikis and Christina Applegate, appear to have hit a rough patch. Child-rearing has found Fischer too tired for sex, whilst Wilson is kinda sorta noticing his young babysitter. Applegate and Sudeikis don’t have kids, but similarly, Sudeikis’ urges aren’t being fulfilled (except by himself), and his eye practically wanders out of its socket. One day, a mutual friend (Joy Behar, of all people) has a suggestion for the wives; Give their husbands a week-long ‘Hall Pass’, where the males have a week to do whatever they want, with whomever they want. The idea is that the men will realise that they’re carrying on like toolbag horndogs and it’ll make them see the light and appreciate what they already have at home. Whilst the boys are sowing their wild oats, the girls go on vacation and find temptations of their own. Nicky Whelan is the hot Aussie barista whom Wilson ogles, Rob Cowan is a douchebag rich acquaintance, Alyssa Milano plays a chick with a fake rack (and who for some reason I thought was an Alyssa Milano lookalike), and Richard Jenkins plays an old horndog who acts as the guys’ mentor in pursuing women half their age (a role that to me seems written for Will Ferrell). Familiar TV faces Stephen Merchant (completely unfunny) and Larry Joe Campbell play a couple of dorky mates of the guys.

The overrated Farrelly Brothers (the OK “Dumb and Dumber”, the uneven “There’s Something About Mary”) give us yet another disappointment with this 2011 comedy, co-written by Kevin Barnett and Pete Jones. Although I chuckled a few times, I genuinely don’t understand why this film’s basic concept was considered a comedy gold mine. Like I said, I chuckled here and there (Sudeikis gets a great bit in about a woman’s vagina. Shameless, but very funny), but the basic premise and situations are simply unpleasant. These aren’t funny situations at all, they’re depressing, unlikeable, and frankly best kept behind closed doors. I’m no prude (I enjoyed Nicky Whelan’s…um…appearance in this film very much), but I’m sorry, this material should’ve been used in a drama not a comedy. For starters, given what one of the four main characters does by the end of the film (and presumably never confesses to it), it makes you absolutely hate that person and thus the ending is anything but happy, neat, or satisfying. Truth be told, none of these characters come off as sympathetic, and given that two of them are played by the laidback Owen Wilson (who even managed to make douchy likeable in “How Do You Know?”) and the sunny Jenna Fischer, that’s quite a non-achievement.

To be honest, I never bought into the title notion of a ‘Hall Pass’ in marriage in the first place. And it’s not just because the idea springs from a suggestion by an out-of-place (and acting-challenged) Joy Behar like a reject from one of those Nora Ephron movies where the supporting characters awkwardly throw in relationship advice to the protagonists that almost always sounds too much like movie dialogue (unless you’re talking early Ephron, ala “When Harry Met Sally” or “Sleepless in Seattle”). No, I just flat-out thought it was a stupid idea, and one that these seemingly intelligent adults would never have gone for. And if you can’t believe in the basic premise of the film, it’s clearly not going to work for you as a film overall, is it? Especially a film that, comedy or not, seems to want to exist in the real world. It just seemed like such a reach that the wives would choose this as the solution (a pretty juvenile solution if you ask me) to their supposed problems, without thinking of any other solution first (At least that we can tell). I didn’t believe it.

The roles of the wives are also miscast. I couldn’t for one second believe that someone married to the gorgeous Jenna Fischer and the former Kelly Bundy, would even consider needing a ‘Hall Pass’ from them. Even decades on from her most famous role, Christina Applegate still looks largely the same, for starters. Yes, the wives are the ones who insisted on it, but I just didn’t buy the set-up from the get-go because if I were married to either of these two women, as played by these two actresses, I would never even joke about cheating on them (Nor any woman at all, but still…) I wouldn’t suggest the women deserve to get cheated on here, but at the same time, I didn’t have any sympathy for them at all (at least their dopey husbands seem too inept to do anything about their lustful intentions), largely because I didn’t believe they’d allow this to even theoretically happen. What about couples’ therapy first? Oh wait, Jon Favreau already tackled similar territory (equally poorly I might add) in “Couples Retreat”. But seriously, why would any woman want to be married to a guy who after a decade or so of a committed relationship will then happily agree to leave the marriage for a week to get his rocks off elsewhere? In that case, divorce would appear to be the better option, especially for the childless Applegate and Sudeikis. Worse still, given that the initial idea of the ‘Hall Pass’ was to be a test (for two guys who hadn’t even really shown any true signs of wanting to stray, I might add. Noticing that other beautiful women exist is not, in my view, a definite precursor to infidelity!), it makes the behaviour of at least one of the two women in particular especially reprehensible. It also makes the whole film kinda pointless when you think about it (Unless the point is that the Farrelly’s hate women, and I hope that’s not the point). If the point was to show that the women had the same urges as the men did, then it simply wasn’t conveyed well enough for me to get that out of it.

Like I said, this just isn’t funny, at least not as presented here. To be honest, the whole film plays like an uncomfortable attempt by the Farrelly’s to meld their brand of gross-out humour (best represented by the first half of “There’s Something About Mary”, before the laughs dried up entirely) with the more recent Judd Apatow brand of gross-out humour. It fails, however because it simply isn’t funny, especially the gross-out stuff. Even the non-gross stuff rarely works, with the usage of the “Law & Order” musical cue especially pointless (Simply using it isn’t a joke in and of itself, surely). The Farrelly’s are also nowhere near as good as Apatow at combining the comedy with drama or at least realistic touches. In fact, instead of “Funny People” or “The 40 Year-Old Virgin”, if anything, this film is on about the level of other Apatow-esque comedy-dramas like “The Dilemma” and “The Switch”, and Adam Sandler’s “Just Go With It”. That is not a good level to be on because those films also failed to convince in their plots and characters. They each featured people doing stupid things simply because there’d be no film otherwise. In “The Dilemma”, Vince Vaughn is forced to keep a secret about someone else’s marriage to the potential detriment of his own, which simply wouldn’t be the case in the real world, but was necessary purely for plot reasons. In “The Switch” (which was thankfully kinda funny), Jason Bateman does something unbelievably stupid, and spends the majority of the rest of the film not owning up to it. Once again, there’d be no film, otherwise. And Sandler’s “Just Go With It” told the audience what it expected of them with regards to its stupid characters and idiotic plot contrivances.

Maybe married people will relate better to this film than I did. Maybe I’m truly missing out here on some basic truth or resonance. But I have to call it as I see it as a single heterosexual male. This film is largely unfunny (pot brownies? Really? In the 21^st century?), features unpleasant characters, and its basic premise seems to come only out of the movies, not real-life, and isn’t really ripe for comedy. I just didn’t enjoy this one at all, it made me squirm for the most part. Most of the score I give this film goes to Nicky Whelan’s stunning boobs. Seriously, they’re impressive. The film isn’t.

Rating: C