Alright so I'm a couple days behind on this, but I have my reasons...and this will be a pretty short one because, well, I'm tired.
Anyway, my first review of 2012 (simply because it happened to be one of the first movies I saw in the new year) is "Our Idiot Brother."
I'm not a huge comedy fan, as one may have guessed from following this blog, so I naturally was not too thrilled to be watching this film. It's not that I dislike comedy, I just highly prefer horror, sci-fi, action or drama over it...but I still enjoy films of all kinds.
I must say that I was pleasantly surprised in this case...for the most part. It was good in some ways, but very flawed in others.
The film opens with the "brother" Ned, played by Paul Rudd, ignorantly selling marijuana to a uniformed cop. Right off the bat we get the clue that he's not a bright guy. Ned goes to his parole officer who tells him that he must live with a family member in order to keep a close watch on him. Ned is survived by his mother and three sisters, who also become central characters in the story. Of the three sisters, there is Miranda (played by Elizabeth Banks) who is a seemingly heartless reporter constantly trying to break a big story at the risk of other people's feelings. There is also Natalie (played by Zooey Deschanel) and Liz (played by Emily Mortimer). Nat is a hippie-like lesbian who is comically unsure of her sexuality while Liz plays an unhappy housewife struggling to come to terms with the fact that her husband is cheating on her.
As they all have their turns at taking Ned in for a period of time, each sister has a way of manipulating him into their lives, whether that be intentional or not.
While trying to adjust to this new "lifestyle," Ned really can't seem to get things right even though he tries to help everyone around him. What it comes down to is that he is too peaceful and too naive. Ned starts to get blamed for many things that were inadvertently his fault as a result of the girls' manipulation. He finally learns to stick up for himself and gets into trouble with the law, but the sisters come to the rescue and all is okay in the world of Ned.
Obviously I summed up a whole lot, but as I previously mentioned as a disclaimer, I am not a big comedy fan. Therefore I don't always know the rules of comedy, but I was sure not to take this one too seriously. Going in with that mindset really helped because there were definitely some elements of decent storytelling in this film. I thought the sisters were all very well developed characters and we actually came to know Ned better through their development. This was one of the big things that I enjoyed about the film. However, this is also where comedy fans may find it to be a flaw. Most comedies, with the rare exception, sacrifice good storytelling for laughs. This one actually had decent storytelling, but not a lot of laughs. I don't necessarily remember laughing out loud one time in particular, but I really appreciated the characters here.
The story itself is rather generic with a hint of originality. The major flaws, story-wise, that I found was that the beginning was way too rushed. We are immediately thrown into the first inciting incident with Ned selling drugs to the cop. We don't get eased in and we never really learn much about Ned until too late into the story.
Overall I give the movie about 2.5 out of 5, just because there should have been more laughs. Had I actually found the film to be funny it might have been raised to 3, or possibly 3.5 if it were really funny...but it wasn't. So this is where I stand.
