‘Why Him’ just another boring, clockwork plot
Franco meets the parents but Cranston not a De Niro
(5) WHY HIM? Directed by: John Hamburg. Starring: Bryan Cranston, James Franco, Zoey Deutch, Megan Mullally, Griffin Gluck and Keegan-Michael Key. Showing at: The Boardwalk, Baywest and Hemingways. Reviewed by: Tim Robey.
WHEN they remade Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in 2005, flipping the races for that already musty comedy of intergenerational horror, they called it Guess Who. That film, starring the late Bernie Mac as the disapproving dad and Ashton Kutcher as the feckless son-in-law-to-be, was more than anything a Meet the Parents retread.
In the same lineage, we now get Why Him?, with variations on these roles played by Bryan Cranston and James Franco – the one, a stuffy conservative pop managing a private printing company, and the other, his sexually ostentatious, flash-the-cash nemesis.
The party game to be played with any one of these films is Name That Daughter.
You’ll be doing well to get off the mark at all. These daddies’ girls rarely get much say in the storytelling, but just sit by while the two most important men in their lives make doomed attempts to communicate.
Writer-director John Hamburg knows the formula inside out at this point, having written Meet the Parents and both of its sequels.
The most fun he’s had here is conceiving the lifestyle of Franco’s Laird Mayhew, a Silicon Valley playboy of lavish wealth, wholly taste-free body art and non-existent boundaries.
He has dreadful purchases splashed across every wall of his ludicrous modernist mansion, including a dead moose suspended in its own urine. He slinks around in pyjamas, flirting uninhibitedly with his girlfriend’s mum (Megan Mullally) and palling up with the teenage brother (Griffin Gluck), mainly by swearing his head off.
It’s puzzling why the film can’t drum up more laughs in response to his goatish shtick, but it’s something to do with Cranston, who’s unable to summon the terrifying dislike of a De Niro, and doesn’t substitute anything else that quite works.
He’s too innately reasonable, this decent dad, and even his attempts to sabotage the match feel half-hearted – rusty cogs in the boring, clockwork plot.
It’s telling that the one major set-piece they think up for him involves a fully-automated and paper-free toilet in Laird’s bathroom.
Hamburg’s always reaching for poo-based humour in his more desperate moments – fully a third of his worst movie, Along Came Polly, was spent hanging out in loo cubicles with Ben Stiller’s irritable bowels. Must we again?
As for your Name That Daughter answer: step forward Zoey Deutch, who made a promising breakthrough this year in Everybody Wants Some!, and must be optimistic that her CV hasn’t peaked, in this instance, with Stephanie Fleming, a role so trophy-ish Ian Fleming could have written it.