Hall Pass

Especially if you've been watching any comedies from the 90's, HALL PASS just serves as a bigger disappointment that the comedic filmmaker duo, The Farrelly Brothers, have lost their touch. Completely realized in HALL PASS, this is a film that so often thinks its being funny, and if the scenes were, then later fragments that place old events to new events, titlecards with the music from "Law and Order", and abrupt endings would compliment it. But, because every scene is HALL PASS is crass, boring, or obvious, none of these flairs do anything. Perhaps if they directed someone else's really funny script, they could still make a good movie, but the days of THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY and KINGPIN have flown away. Instead, HALL PASS take one insanely fake and impossible situation, and thinks it's funny to lather it in another fake and impossible situation. If one of these were even halfway real, then they might have a funny film. Consider a scene where the two boys (Owen Wilson and Jason Sudekis) inexplicably and conveniently get lost while on a house tour with their wives. Everyone else goes into the family's panic room, a soundproof, concealed room with video/sound of the entire house. Inside the panic room, the stunned house owners see and hear Wilson and Sudekis make a bunch of crass jokes about their wives and the house owners themselves. After three minutes of this, they're thrown out, and their wives end up unconvincingly giving them both hall passes (a week off of marriage). But we've already seen from the earlier scene that an unconvincing premise is just handled with another unconvincing punch-line, and the whole film acts in this dull, scattershot way.

★ out of Five