Hall Pass

** stars

In this light and harmless Farrelly Brothers comedy, Hall Pass seems to be obsessed with its premise: two guys who get a week off from marriage to do whatever they want. You know what that means. Get ready for the desperation to have sex with other women.

Unfortunately, the movie fails to deliver the amount of laughs it promises. Instead, it settles for a mild amusing romp starring Jason Sudeikis and a miscast Owen Wilson.

Wilson seems to be mailing it in here. I think this is the wrong movie for him. Wilson is great when playing more of a sidekick (Zoolander, Meet the Parents), but when he takes on the lead, the pressure falls on him for laughs. With that, his monotonic awkwardness starts to occupy the screen rather than what he is actually saying.

Perhaps this film is geared towards a slightly older audience. Not maturer, but older. This is a story about two guys named Rick (Wilson) and Fred (Sudeikis) who are obsessed with sex, but haven't actually experienced it in a long time. Their wives, Maggie (Jenna Fischer) and Grace (Christina Applegate) notice this, and after an embarrassing afternoon at a friends house when the guys are overheard talking about gratuitous sex, they find no other way to fix the problem than to just let the husbands take a week of from marriage. But are they doing it for their husband or for themselves?

I like this idea, however the slow execution by the Farrelly Brothers puts the flame out before the fire gets hot. We get glimpses of funny scenes, but they never really take off. In one amusing sequence, Rick and Fred join their guy friends for a lovely day of golf, on brownies. This is one of many scenes that has a very funny premise, but fails to heighten them above the obvious. We know taking brownies will make you act goofy, but not always stereotypically goofy the way they are portrayed in this film.

Perhaps I was looking for a more raunchy experience. When you have a premise like this, live up to it. While the morality of these characters is the key ingredient to them growing-up, I feel as though they held back on the gratuity for all the wrong reasons. In Todd Phillips The Hangover, the three lead characters were put through immoral situations, and the only way for those characters to get through them (without falling from grace) was to take as much morality back with them as they could. In Hall Pass, Rick and Fred were questioning their morality from the start, and because of that, we knew that they weren't going to do what they set out to do.

I think the Farrelly Brothers are still important comedic filmmakers. Comedies are becoming less and less relevant these days, and there have been worst comedies as of late than this. In the end, at least Hall Pass didn't Just Go With It.