Why Him? Review

Why Him? More like, Why Me? This wasn't a particularly funny film despite having that aim often hitting a high cringe factor and while I did laugh at times, there were few of those moments. The film is based around Ned Fleming (Bryan Cranston) heading over to California in order to spend Christmas with his daughter and her Silicon Valley rich boyfriend.

Most of this experience is a complete surprise for Ned and the crazy boyfriend Laird (James Franco) is incredibly over the top. Laird does however have a fairly sweet pad and an interesting arrangement in how he lives. Everything is modern while adding some futuristic concepts and a funny take on personal assistants as the house is monitored by the always watching Justine (Kaley Cuoco).

This is where I must say that there were some portions that caused laughter, but generally I didn't find much of it funny and neither did the audience. Most of the jokes are based around extremely high levels of profanity and the cringe factor. It's almost like they took it too far at points and the movie was just a strung together series of what wild things Franco's character was doing.

Being rich, Laird also has a personal assistant named Gustav (Keegan-Michael Key) which goes around keeping things together and his character was mostly funny. Other than that I didn't care for any of the core characters finding them all to be rather stupid in their actions throughout.

The typical cliché family moments were all in here as well and none of them felt earned or even made sense considering the few days the group spent together. I'd typically spend more time going over the acting, but there wasn't anything good here. It was mostly just Franco swearing despite everyone telling him not to and Ned's daughter Stephanie (Zoey Deutch) whining about everyone not getting along.

The mother also didn't make any sense initially being about the same as Ned only to take a dive off the deep end into some weird almost dysfunctional individual. I'll also mention that this felt like a rather long movie (1 hr, 51 min run time) and it could have been cut down a bit.

The Conclusion

I didn't find Why Him? to be that funny with only a few moments where I did laugh. Many of the jokes just weren't great and the movie wasn't good in general. Nothing really made sense in the film and nothing came together aside from some typical cliché moments that didn't even come close to being earned.

There was even a point where a single person laughed loudly in the quiet theater and apologized after when I assume they realized that the joke wasn't funny. I can't totally hate on Why Him? as being a comedy it provide a couple laughs, but overall it was not a good time.

Why Him? Review at Theater with Standard Viewing
Screening Provided by 20th Century Fox

Rating Overall: 4.3