HALL PASS

Rating: 2

There is in the epilogue of HALL PASS a reminder of how gloriously demented a Farrelly Brothers movie used to be. Stephen Merchant’s hopelessly repressed character is offered the eponymous break from married life and imagines a series of interludes that grow more ridiculous and more dire with a geometric progression that ends in a scene not suitable for young eyes or faint hearts. It is hilarious. Little else here is. The plot of allowing two mildly geeky husbands (Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis), bored with the humdrum routine of married love and given permission from their wives to spend a week experiencing the single life again with no strings attached is the stuff of a mid-level television sitcom. The execution not quite that good.
The doldrums extend to the wives in question (Jenna Fischer and Christina Applegate), who resent their husbands ogling the younger and perkier members of their sex. Sex itself has become less a pleasurable diversion than a cross between a duty and a habit, which explains why Fred (Sudeikis) has taken to his car, the one parked on the street in front of his house, in order to indulge in self-pleasuring. It earns Fred a police record and the hall pass. Rick (Wilson), the other husband, earns his by infuriating his wife with circular logic and a boneheaded attitude about connubial bliss. But the wives have something up their sleeves, of course. As the psychiatrist friend of the wives (Joy Behar), the one who put the hall pass idea in their heads to begin with, puts it, they need to be shown that those women they lust for want nothing to do with them. It’s not freedom, it’s a comeuppance in the making. And a wacky joyride it would have been if there were a real commitment to edginess instead of an attempt to inject sentiment into a story. Not ironically. Not satirically. Not well, either.
The wives have more success meeting attractive members of the opposite sex, perhaps because they are not trying. The men turn to their cluelss married friends of advice on how to score, and ice cream for comfort after predictably striking out. None of this is helped by competent, but hardly inspired, performances by all involved. Even the usually reliable Richard Jenkins is less funny than creepy when the part really requires equal measures of each. Maybe it’s the fake tan.
The husbands are sweet dorks who love their wives. The one with kids loves them, too, and they both have a harmless crush on the good-natured and very curvy blonde barista at their favorite coffee house. It’s as though the Farrelly Brothers have run out of steam, become mired in sense of entropy, and given up on forging fearlessly into new comedic territory.
There are a handful of all-too-brief, all-too-teasing moments of the dangerous, unhinged humor that made the reputation of the Farrellys, some accompanied by inspired uses of CGI, or what one hopes is CGI in one case. Alas, for the most part, it is a bland, predictable flick that flirts unsuccessfully with raunch and slapstick in a pale evocation of their previous work. HALL PASS takes its place near the middle of the heap of recent romcoms, the last place one would ever have expected to see from the guys who discovered that THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY.