Sisters should have been a comedic homerun. Putting
Tina Fey and
Amy Poehler
together in a movie is already half the bases covered, and to their
credit, their chemistry is phenomenal. Of celebrity friendships, theirs
is particularly well-loved and well-televised, the ultimate example of
BFF goals. It makes sense the two would team up to bring their
close-as-sisters relationship to the big screen, playing literal sisters
(if the title wasn’t obvious).
Sisters, unfortunately, doesn’t rise to the standards of the talent, or friendship, involved.
In a sea of mediocre bro comedies,
Sisters (from
Pitch Perfect director
Jason Moore) is an easy one to root for; it would have been nice for a female-centric comedy to come out on top. On
Star Wars weekend, no less. Instead, you get the sense that the ladies of sisters (Fey, Poehler, and screenwriter and fellow
SNL alum
Paula Pell)
deserve better. The premise is incredibly simple, which is not a fault,
but the anything-goes structure on such a contained set leaves as much
room for failure as it does for creativity. And a lot—almost
too much happens—when sisters Maura (Poehler) and Kate Ellis (Fey) find out that their parents (played by
James Brolin and
Dianne Wiest)
have sold their childhood home in Orlando, Florida, and decide to have
one last hurrah by throwing a rager. 1980s style, with all their high
school friends, their children and adult responsibilities be damned for
one night.
Image via Universal Pictures
Despite being sisters, Fey and Poehler play complete opposites, and Fey’s Kate, in particular, is the antithesis of her
30 Rock
character Liz Lemon. She’s a cool, confident party girl (or at least
used to be), and she’s never been shy with boys. She prefers to call
herself “brassy” rather than “hot-headed.” In adulthood, she’s a bit of a
mess—unable to hold down a job, she works as a self-employed
hairdresser out of her apartment and she struggles to maintain a
relationship with her teen daughter (
Madison Davenport).
On the other side of the spectrum is her recent divorcée sister Maura,
who is awkward and earnest, the kind of person to apply sunscreen on a
homeless person and hand out inspirational quote cards. She’s a lot like
Parks and Rec’s Leslie Knope, actually. The
sisters’ differences are made comically clear in an early scene when
they are cleaning out their shared childhood bedroom and share passages
from each other their teenage diaries. Kate’s is full of hook-ups and
pregnancy scares while Maura’s is about nerdy things and abstaining from
drugs.
On the night of their big party though, the sisters decide to swap
their usual personalities, Kate agreeing to be the designated sober
party mom so Maura can “let her freak flag fly”—something she missed out
on 20-plus years ago. Just as the Ellis sisters and their childhood
friends are reunited under one roof again, the film, too, is a reunion
in itself—how meta!—with a stacked cast of
SNL players.
Chris Parnell shows up early as one of Kate’s customers, the hysterical
Kate McKinnon leads a carabiner-toting lesbian posse,
Rachel Dratch shows up as a character that Rachel Dratch does best (a spin-off of Debbie Downer), while
Bobby Moynihan plays the self-appointed class clown who’s still looking for affirmation from his schoolmates.
Maya Rudolph,
especially, shines as the salty mean girl Brenda, who keeps popping up
uninvited and speaks as much with her flared nostrils as she does with
her overly enunciated insults.
Image via Universal Pictures
With a cast like that it’s literally impossible not to have funny moments, and
Sisters
does induce plenty of laughter. But most, if not all, of them are sharp
in comedic writing as well as acting and the jokes feel far too
elementary for their level of expertise.
Sisters commendably proves that girls can be just as dirty as your boys (take that,
Hangover and
Jump Street)
but the film suffers most during its body humor parts. The butt jokes
alone! They’re funny when Amy Poehler fumbles to hit on her hot neighbor
James (
Ike Barinholtz) in a comically overdrawn
segment about how he has a nice butt and then accidentally saying things
like “I wanna get lost in that butt.” It’s dirty, but still endearing.
What doesn’t work is the equally (but painfully) overdrawn bit when a
ballerina-shaped music box gets stuck in James’ rectum due to a
foreplay injury. It turns and turns and turns while it plays Beethoven’s
“Für Elise” and the punch line is that this is super awkward and of
course something like this would happen to Maura when she tries to get
laid. There are more than a couple painfully overdrawn jokes, which all
add up to an exhausting 118-minute run time (for what could have been a
short and sweet 90 minutes). Bobby Moynihan’s character gets this
treatment too, after he snorts way too much cocaine and tells far too
many jokes that fall flat. He’s seen hanging out while
hanging out,
drawing graffiti dicks on the wall with his own dick. Sure, the film is
about a bunch of grown-ups having their one last stupid teen night, but
the jokes themselves don’t need to be so amateur. As expected in a Tina
Fey comedy, Asian jokes and sex worker jokes also abound, involving a
Korean nail salon worker, Hae-Won (
Greta Lee). It’s predictable, and if not offensive, only half-heartedly funny.
Image via Universal Pictures
One stand-out from the party guests is wrestler
John Cena,
who plays the stoic drug dealer whose drug kit is filled with
everything from molly to Flintstone gummies. Cena, who impressed in
Trainwreck earlier
this year, is really showing his skills as a comedic actor. Still, he
doesn’t steal the show from Fey and Poehler. This movie would have been
better with a heavier focus on just these two rather than bringing in
their
SNL entourage, as evidenced by the film’s funniest
scenes—when Kate helps Maura hit on the neighbor or when they dig
through their old bedroom or when they go to the mall to shop for party
clothes, in a makeover montage gone wrong, before concluding that they
need a little less Forever 21 and a little more Suddenly 42. If the film
lacks in comedic substance it’s at least carried by two stellar
leads—they may not look like sisters but they sure are ride or die, and
that at least makes for a pretty enjoyable watch.
Grade: C+
Sisters is in theaters Friday, December 18.
