Movie Review: 'Sisters'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- It has seemed of late as if any time Tina Fey and Amy Poehler team up, everything comes up roses.
Whether they've been behind the news desk on television's Saturday Night Live, hosting the Golden Globes award show, or co-starring in a hit movie (2008's Baby Mama), these comedy sisters could do no wrong.
Until now.
Now they've done something wrong and it's called Sisters.
Originally titled The Nest, it's a wrongheaded, back-to-the-drawing board comedy featuring the two prodigious comedy talents as siblings.
In it, they more or less reverse the casting dynamic of Baby Mama, their last movie project together, by having Fey play Kate Ellis, the wild older sister who is dissatisfied with her personal and professional life, with Poehler as Maura Ellis, the more grounded younger sister, recently divorced but reliably responsible and generous, who lends her older sister money.
They play sibs who find out that their parents, played by Dianne Wiest and James Brolin (who also play spouses on the current TV sitcom, Life in Pieces), are selling their childhood home in the Orlando, Florida suburbs.
So Kate and Maura decide to throw one last house party, as wild a blowout at "Ellis Island" as they can dream up, with Kate agreeing to stay sober and be the "party Mom."
As premises go, this one is wafer-thin, to say the most.
The director is Jason Moore (Pitch Perfect), who works from an idea and script by Paula Pell, a veteran writer on Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock, while Fey served as a producer and Poehler as one of the executive producers.
Fey and Poehler are too naturally funny not to produce a few scattered but legitimate laughs along the way. But the screenplay rides well off the rails.
By the third act, the already-overfamiliar, party-getting-out-of-hand thrust completely wears out its welcome: by then, the only audience members who still care are those who live for scenes of wanton, arbitrary material destruction – of ceilings, floors, beds, rugs, furniture, windows, doors, roof, lawn, swimming pool, you name it -- with no buildup and no internal logic.
The large ensemble in support, many of them from Saturday Night Live, don't get to do much more than function as human props. Which is a shame, because the film surely could have used their help. That includes John Leguizamo, Kate McKinnon, Rachel Dratch, Bobby Moynihan, Maya Rudolph, Samantha Bee, John Cena, Greta Lee, Madison Davenport, Jon Glaser, and Ike Barinholtz.
In the late going, the script takes a halfhearted stab at poignancy, but it's far too little and far too much at the same time, and certainly far too late.
With a setup this flimsy to begin with – one that would sit much more comfortably and appropriately in a movie aimed at and involving teens rather than thirtysomethings, such as House Party or Project X or Can't Hardly Wait -- Sisters sets off with nowhere to go but up. And yet, as it proceeds, the vehicle seems more and more beneath the comedic dignity of the two stars.
Commercially speaking, with Sisters presenting itself as counterprogramming on Star Wars: The Force Awakens weekend, the film should be in fine shape. But the target audience better be in a forgiving or undemanding mood because this movie lacks ambitiousness to an amazing degree.
And it would seem that Fey and Poehler realize this and that it's on them to raise the level of the subpar material because -- and this is obvious in this case but uncharacteristic of them – we often catch them trying too hard.
Ultimately, the film's biggest problem might be the one shared by just about all bad party flicks that traffic in mayhem: that the audience is painfully aware that they are watching performers who are clearly having a much better time than they are.
So we'll host 2 stars out of 4. Two-word review of Sisters? Oh, brother.
