Ben Stiller lives in a massive house in a possibly more massively boring town. His character is basically the same as the guy from the 'Meet the Parents' series (comedically Stillery boring). He runs a shop, and has a collection of pointless hobbies and ethnic friends (though so far he's only got a Korean mum, a Hispanic guy that works for him and then dies, and lots of white ones). His wife is boring too, but less funny, and she buggers off right away to visit NYC because she wants to see the world (not sure I follow her line of reasoning there). Alien stuff starts happening, and before long Stiller and his band of fools are ineffectually battling them. Can they save both their boring town and the world?
Of course they can, fool, but the journey we take to get there isn't even hugely enjoyable. There are many funny moments, but none are hilarious. The main problems come from the bad writing (the script relies too much on them saying not particularly funny things quickly, which rarely works for me - 'New Girl' was alright (I liked the guy who didn't shave often enough, drank, and was trying to write a book... For some reason), but Jesus, there was more than one season?) and a plot that manages to both drag its feet as far as story development goes, and cram in lots of dumb situations. "Ha ha - look, they're taking pictures with the alien... Aha, still taking pictures... Eh... When is it going to wake up? Ah, there we go, finally" was something that I thought at least once (once) during this movie.
The start isn't too bad. This style of comedy is always great at set ups, as we can have lots of funny introductory visuals and maybe a voice over. The movie soon descends into a series of crashed orgies and house parties that fail to be either interesting or funny. A lot of these scenes break up the movie into sketches, which doesn't work in it's favour. There was even the cheesy singing all together in a car scene, which I admittedly found guiltily enjoyable.
I really did want to like this, mostly because it has aliens and Richard Ayoade in it (I didn't see that reveal coming, by the way. Stupid of me) but I just didn't. It was funny, but it wasn't very engaging or memorable. Sorry Richard, I love everything else you do (even 'Gadget Man' is effectively a far better 'Gadget Show'). Oh, and the creature effects were pretty good too, bonus point for them (the CGI group scenes looked a bit 2005 though).
The Watch: 29.7