• ⇤
• ⇽
• ≡
• ⇾
• ⇥

movie review - We're the Millers

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

I enjoyed this movie more than I expected to. More, I think, than perhaps I should. It's about an ersatz family pulled together out of opportunity for a big drug smuggling job. There's a loving couple, a smart older daughter, and a young awkward son. Never mind that the "parents" detest each other and are both manipulative and irritable people whose lives are mess (one's an unemployed stripper, the other's a drug dealer), the girl's a runaway, and that the naïve son has been abandoned by his lone remaining parent. Never mind that the drug deal is being conducted between a dangerous Mexican cartel and an unstable and untrustworthy "friend" of the drug-dealer father Stateside. What I enjoyed about this was the uneasy way the "family" comes together, and the way that it ultimately falls apart.

Strongly recommended. A favorite. There; I said it.