Review of Keeping Up with the Joneses (2016) by Gerardistheway — 08 Nov 2016

You'd think, with so much talent on screen, that the year's "perfect date-night comedy" would be able to provide a little more, well...Comedy. It's kinda hard to laugh when what should be inspiring said laughter is the awkward interactions of the Gaffneys (Zach Galifianakis, Isla Fisher) and the Joneses (Jon Hamm, Gal Gadot).

That's not to say I didn't laugh at this movie. There are indeed inspired moments of true comedy, but these are far too fleeting to sustain the entire film on the brief laughs they produce (the way I imagine it is somewhat like trying to light the entire Empire State Building by candlelight with one measly candle on the bottom floor). The problem is that either A.) this movie thinks it's a lot funnier than it actually is, B.) the creators think so lowly of their audience that they think they can put in as little effort as possible and simply coast on the charm of their lead stars, or both. I wonder if some sort of system could be implemented in which the average number of watch-checks by audience members equals the number of years the director and screenwriter of said movie must return to film school before being allowed to work on the silver screen again. To me, that seems like a good solution to a lot of problems within modern cinema, though poor Michael Bay and Friends would be there until they died.

While I'm at it, let's hear it for the incredibly generic and overused "spies in suburbia hiding in plain sight" storyline, which in the days of "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" at least held the distinction of being fairly fresh and original. The execution wasn't exactly brilliant in those days either, but it was enough of a new idea to at least sell tickets. After a number of similar movies with varying degrees of success ("The Spy Next Door", "Central Intelligence", and "Knight and Day", to name a few) the dead horse is all but beaten to a bloody ruined pulp. Any movie these days that I actually want to see (Barry Jenkins's "Moonlight") or think at least looks interesting enough to check out (Rob Zombie's "31") is given a limited release, and thus I'm forced to settle for the generic wide-release cash cows that plague theaters across the country. I need to give Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater, and a few others a call soon...Maybe if I beg them hard enough, they'll start returning some of the artful magic to movies.

Right, the storyline (what little of one there is)...I almost forgot. Jeff Gaffney (Galifianakis) and his wife Karen (Fisher) are looking forward to spending some quality time together over the summer after shipping off their sons to camp, but after a fantasy sequence that ends disastrously (one of the few truly funny moments) they mainly just settle back into their normal lives as an incredibly unhelpful HR representative and an interior decorator, respectively. Bored and not particularly fond of the neighbors they already have, they are ecstatic when a new handsome, worldly couple moves in down the street (Hamm and Gadot) and immediately try to befriend them. However, their perfection in everything they do and some odd behaviors arouse Karen's suspicion, and pretty soon both she and Jeff are wrapped up in the craze of finding out who's been using Jeff's computer to talk to an international arms dealer (Patton Oswalt, who decided to downgrade from voice work in Academy Award-winning animated films to this kind of junk) whose motives, history, and utterly unoriginal bad guy name are given an explanation for all of 30 seconds (the lattermost, not at all; it seems like it only existed for the point of throwing in a one-liner at some point). At about the 20-minute mark, you can more or less guess everything else that's going to happen in the movie.

Casting Zach Galifianakis in a movie that so squanders his comedic talent is a sin in itself, but both he and Fisher, as Jeff and Karen, come off as merely a stereotypical dorky suburban couple that doesn't get out much and are repressed beyond belief in the bedroom (running the risk of sounding slightly misogynistic, I imagine the last thing a lot of people would be is repressed in the bedroom with a wife like Isla Fisher). The Joneses are far more interesting to watch, particularly Jon Hamm, who makes the best of a bad situation and manages to make some of his material somewhat enjoyable (compared to the other, ahem, "jokes" found within this movie). Oswalt's villain is perhaps best described as a terrible re-imagining of the Benjamin Chudnofsky character from 2011's "The Green Hornet", except whinier, more sloppily dressed (nothing conveys a rich, bitter nerd like wearing a video game/comic shirt under a suit jacket), and existing for the sole purpose of advancing the plot. Let me be clear, however: none of this is the fault of the actors and actresses. They try their best, but sometimes nothing can save a truly bad movie.

In short, is it worth the price of admission? 'Fraid not.