Rating: R | Runtime: 105 minutes
Release Date: February 25th, 2011 (USA)
Studio: Warner Bros.
Director(s): Bobby Farrelly & Peter Farrelly
Writer(s): Pete Jones, Peter Farrelly, Kevin Barnett & Bobby Farrelly / Pete Jones (story)

Anyone thinking chocolate chip cookie dough on a waffle cone?

It’s a shame that Peter and Bobby Ferrelly never realized their time had come and gone by 1998 with Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin, and There’s Something About Mary—you don’t get much better in the stupid comedy field than that trio. 2003 gave hope they might have found a way to balance their crude and crass potty humor with comedy’s new subtler 21st century ways with Stuck on You surprisingly proving to be good, but, alas, hope subsequently died.

Now the brothers are trying again with Hall Pass four years after their last failed attempt at box office glory. I wanted to be wowed with its two likable leads (Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis) and funny trailer pick-up line, “Excuse me, do these bar napkins smell like chloroform?” The end result is sadly just a mishmash of stylings that’s never sure about what it wants to be. Starting out cutesy with an edge, the movie begins to hit a endearing enough stride to earn interest. Once the filmmakers lose their patience to include exploding farts and male genitalia en route to tear-streaked regret, however, cohesion flies out the window.

The film starts with Wilson’s Rick looking through horribly Photoshopped memories with the kids to reminisce about past glory days before adulthood took over. He and his wife Maggie (Jenna Fischer) are desperate for a quiet night alone, but the prospect doesn’t appear realistic in the near future. So, while Maggie and Grace (Christina Applegate) attempt to hang with friends and nestle into the suburban rut before them, their husbands (rounded out by Sudeikis’ Fred) live vicariously through their Y-chromosome’s need to check out any warm-blooded woman that enters their line of sight.

These two are without question pigs, but they aren’t bad enough to warrant drastic measures until a case of Big Brother security cameras catch their lewd jokes about their hosts while everyone is watching. It’s the final straw to push Maggie into using her friend’s advice to give her husband a week off from marriage. Fred, being the child he is, soon joins after a Styx-backed session of self-pleasuring in his car. Cops bringing your husband home for indecent exposure will make any wife fed up.

The ‘hall pass’ device is ripe for comedy, though, and there are some big laughs. Two middle-aged guys who still think they can bed college-aged girls now that they have permission to try? Yeah, it’s a pretty hilarious concept. Especially when said men and their friends think Applebee’s at nine is a quality place to wade through those hot, sex-crazed nymphomaniacs with Olive Garden and Chili’s offering alternative locales if that well runs dry. So, with “Law & Order” ‘duh-duhs’ sounding for each of their seven days of freedom, the experiment commences with bloated, BBQ-stained lethargy at a franchise restaurant’s trough.

No matter how big their talk, the truth of the matter is that these guys aren’t the young studs they once were. They’ve been “domesticated.” They’ve become accustomed to early nights and a lack of exercise to cultivate an unbridgeable generational gap. When Leigh’s (Nicky Whelan) gorgeous Aussie barista—who’s obviously flirting back—tells Wilson that Snow Patrol is playing on the loudspeaker, his confusion in thinking she’s talking about a Cuba Gooding Jr. film can be nothing but pathetic.

That’s when the Farrellys’ brand of humor takes control. The ‘hall pass’ recipients’ posse of horny old men joins at the start before disappearing once morality and poorly masked romantic comedy tropes—because that’s what this is—arrive. Stephen Merchant is funny in his awkwardness. J.B. Smoove, the best part of last year’s Date Night, is the token POC doing a Charlie Murphy impression. And Larry Joe Campbell is entertaining mainly because he’s the fat guy of the group with snow angels in a sand bunker proving absurd enough to work.

Their shenanigans are tame, though. They do more to show how being on the cusp of 40 really is over-the-hill than actually providing laughs. Wilson and Sudeikis are relatable and their constant striking out has its moments, but the filmmakers don’t quite go for the jugular like they have a decade ago. Hall Pass becomes less about the comedy and more about marital strife and whether flirting is a husband’s way to stay active in his marriage. Maybe it’s the wives who deserve a break from them to feel young again.

It’s weird badmouthing a film that truly made me laugh, but I can’t think back in any real detail about which scenes worked. Sudeikis is the strongest of the leads with his reactionary timing and expressiveness taking his ‘everyman’ sensibilities into hilarity. Wilson plays off him well, but is definitely the straight man—much like Fischer to Applegate, who is a ton of fun as the bored housewife latching onto the affections of a younger man. Did I forget to mention that the girls enjoy time with a college baseball team while the boys go wild back home?

Whelan is enjoyable with her sexy but wholesome femme fatale who is possibly the ‘realest’ part to an otherwise heightened suburbia. Richard Jenkins is always good for a laugh as swinging bachelor Coakley. Derek Waters is fantastic as the self-absorbed coffee shop villain despite his overall entrenchment into Rick and Fred’s lives becoming insanely contrived. And we find out that ex-television stars Vanessa Angel and Alyssa Milano are alive and well. None of this is enough to make me recommend anyone go see the film in the theaters, but at least it makes an ill-conceived visit somewhat pleasurable.

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(L-R) OWEN WILSON as Rick, JENNA FISCHER as Maggie, JASON SUDEIKIS as Fred and CHRISTINA APPLEGATE as Grace in New Line Cinema’s comedy HALL PASS, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo by Peter Iovino.