Why bother? Stinkers don’t get much stinkier than ‘Why Him?’ 
 
 Trusty moviegoers: Please allow me to SPOILER ALERT just one scene from the multi-vehicle car wreck that is “Why Him?” so you can see where I’m coming from when I tell you this is in the bottom 1 percent of movies I’ve ever seen. 
 
 Ready? 
 
 Bryan Cranston’s Ned Fleming is skulking about the home office of James Franco’s Laird Mayhew, an obnoxious Silicon Valley multi-millionaire romancing his precious daughter Stephanie (Zoey Deutch), who has dropped out of Stanford in order to live with this lout. 
 
 Ned is video chatting with Kevin Dingle (don’t you just love these wacky character names?), an employee of Ned’s back home in Michigan. They’re trying to hack Laird’s computer so Ned can dig up some dirt on Laird and persuade his daughter to break it off with Laird. 
 
 When Ned hears Laird and Stephanie approaching the office, he hides under the desk — and he stays there, making horrified faces, as Laird and Stephanie make love. 
 
 That’s right. Rather than stand up and announce himself and make some sort of excuse for why he’s in the room, Ned chooses to stay hidden while his daughter and her crass boyfriend have sex just above him. 
 
 Ha. Ha. Ha. 
 
 When I tell you that’s not even the most noxious scene in “Why Him?,” please believe me. Please spend your hard-earned movie-attending dough on just about anything else playing at the multiplex. For crying out loud, even “Bad Santa 2” and “Office Christmas Party” are better, or at least not as rank, as this stinker. 
 
 The premise of “Why Him?” is SO tired. How many movies and sitcoms have we seen about the father who thinks his daughter’s boyfriend/husband/fiancé/whatever isn’t good enough for her? 
 
 In this case, dad’s horror is justified. The guy romancing his daughter is a nightmare. Yes, he’s an obscenely famous and wealthy video-game inventor — but he’s also a manic, infantile, grotesquely inappropriate, aggressively needy and self-absorbed creep. 
 
 We share dad’s loathing for the boyfriend, but we also have a really, really difficult time empathizing with the supposedly super-smart and grounded and wonderful daughter who is in love with this clown. 
 
 Ned is an old-fashioned family guy who runs an old-fashioned printing company in Grand Rapids. He and his wife Barb (Megan Mullally) have two wonderful children: the aforementioned Stephanie and her younger, weirdly formal brother Scotty (Griffin Gluck). 
 
 Stephanie invites the family out to California to spend Christmas without telling them she has dropped out of Stanford and she’s living with a wealthy techie in his 30s. 
 
 Good move, Stephanie. 
 
 Laird’s mansion is festooned with hideous art, e.g., a dead moose floating in a tank of its own urine. (Can you guess what will happen with that tank down the road?) He has a full-time spiritual advisor named Gustav (Keegan Michael-Key), who seems aware and resigned to the fact he’s counseling a developmentally stunted person. 
 
 Laird gets a giant tattoo of the Fleming family on his back, makes sexually suggestive remarks to Stephanie’s mother, describes having sex with Stephanie in graphic detail at a family dinner, gives wildly inappropriate advice to young Scotty and builds a bowling alley featuring Ned’s likeness on the wall in order to win over Ned. 
 
 Not funny, not funny, not funny, not funny, not funny. 
 
 And in one of the most egregious cases in recent years of crowbarring a bit into a movie, we’re told Ned was a big fan of Kiss back in the day — which leads to a monumentally unfunny and oh-so-predictable payoff later in the story. 
 
 Years ago, the great Roger Ebert told me it takes people with real talent to make the most unforgettably terrible movies. Hack directors and wooden actors will deliver consistently mediocre fare, but the most spectacular misfires are often the result of gifted people taking a shot at something different — and crashing and burning in legendary fashion. 
 
 Think of Lucasfilm’s production of “Howard the Duck.” Spielberg’s “1941.” Beatty and Hoffman and Elaine May with “Ishtar.” Michael “The Deer Hunter” Cimino and “Heaven’s Gate.” Rob Reiner, director of “A Few Good Men” and “The Princess Bride” and “Misery,” giving us “North,” which inspired Roger’s immortal passage: “I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it.” 
 
 Granted, “Why Him?” director John Hamburg isn’t Steven Spielberg or Rob Reiner, but he’s written some big hits (“Meet the Parents,” “Zoolander”) and he knows comedy. 
 
 Jonah Hill has a “story” credit on the film. Cranston and Franco are two of the most gifted and versatile actors on the planet. Supporting players from Mullaly to Keegan-Michael Key to Cedric the Entertainer try their best. 
 
 That’s a whole lot of talent contributing to a black hole of a comedy. 
 
 Zero Stars 
 
 20th Century Fox presents a film directed by John Hamburg and written by Hamburg and Ian Helfer. Rated R (for strong language and sexual material throughout). Running time: 111 minutes. Opens Friday at local theaters. ||||| Why Him? 
 
 type Movie genre Comedy release date 12/23/16 performer James Franco, Bryan Cranston, Megan Mullally director John Hamburg distributor Fox Current Status In Season 
 
 We gave it a C 
 
 You often hear screenwriters talk about the “idea” of their screenplay. Not the situation, the characters, or the plot: The deeper theme, some elemental conflict motivating all of the above. This is because screenwriters are smart people, and because we all need something to believe in. But the Hollywood hard-R comedy has never felt so shallow. Every title is an elevator pitch: Bad Moms, Dirty Grandpa, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates. Once you get the concept, you can fill in the blanks. There will be celebrity cameos; there will be overqualified TV comedians improvising their way through supporting roles; there will be gross-out humor about private parts gone public; in the end, there will be hugs. 
 
 So credit Why Him? for an unusual virtue: It gives good subtext. Bryan Cranston plays Ned Fleming, 55 years old and a paragon of 55-year-old American ideals. He runs a paper company in Michigan. Anyone who watched The Office knows “paper company” is a synonym for “dying business.” Ned’s got problems. He’s losing business to China and online banner ads. The company’s deep in debt, mere months from bankruptcy. He’s grooming his teen son (Griffin Gluck) to take over the family business, but it’s clear Ned’s trapped in a distant past. (He uses an Earthlink account.) 
 
 Detroit has popped up in big blockbusters the last few years, almost always playing somewhere else. It was Gotham and Metropolis in Batman v Superman; it was China in Trans4mers. In Why Him? the Rust Belt setting serves a real purpose. Ned has done everything right: His employees love him, his peers respect him, he’s paying for his daughter’s Stanford education. He used to be a car salesman, selling Datsuns. What, some millennial asks him, is a Datsun? Something, Ned says, that “doesn’t exist anymore.” It’s a throwaway line, but Cranston gives it layers. Will his company exist anymore? Will he? 
 
 And so, the film’s conceit: Send this man to Silicon Valley, out of the past and into the future! Ned’s family flies out to Palo Alto to spend Christmas with their daughter Stephanie (Zoey Deutch) and her mysterious new boyfriend. He is Laird Mayhew, and he is James Franco, or whichever secret James Franco clone shoots big studio comedies while his lookalike duplicates make TV shows and Faulkner movies. Laird has a big modernist house that’s also a trendy office, a modern art gallery, and a zoo. He’s been coding since he was 13, and he invented Guerilla Gang, a nonspecifically popular videogame where gorillas are guerillas. 
 
 The movie’s joke is easy, but it’s still clever. Laird is a maniac, half-punk and half-hippie, prone to f-bombs and impulse-buy back tattoos. Ned should hate Laird because he’s a bad influence. But modern society calls Laird a genius and puts him on magazine covers. He’s an entrepreneur; he’s pals with Elon Musk; he met Stephanie when Stanford invited him to speak. And by golly, he’s rich. For dinner, he hires “the cute one from Top Chef” to create a one-night-only Fleming-themed pop-up restaurant. He builds Ned bespoke bowling lanes. He has a smarthouse A.I. voiced by Kaley Cuoco, though my fan theory is that he actually just trapped Cuoco in his walls. He throws a party and invites his entrepreneur friends, including the brother-sister tycoons (Andrew Rannells and Casey Wilson) who run the digital company putting analog Ned out of business. Director John Hamburg co-wrote the Meet the Parents trilogy; consider this Meet the Disruptors. 
 
 Ned is skeptical, or just frustrated. “Most of these internet companies,” he huffs, “are built on smoke and mirrors.” The film’s title is supposed to reflect the mood of a desperate father – “Why did my daughter choose this guy?” But it’s also a stealth missile of social anguish: “Why did everyone choose this guy?” 
 
 It all works in theory. But the execution’s off. Megan Mullally makes a fine foil for Cranston as his wife, Barb, but besides a raucous seduction scene, the film doesn’t give her much to do. That’s also true of Zoey Deutch, given a doubly thankless girlfriend-daughter role. In the Teri Polo part, Deutch somehow has less to do than Teri Polo. And where the original Meet the Parents was a slow burn of comedic tension, Why Him? goes full-blown absurd from the moment the Flemings walk into Laird’s house. The film wants to be a comedy of excess, but it just feels excessive. Laird’s got an estate manager with a foreign-man accent (Keegan-Michael Key, trying.) He’s got a dead moose suspended in its own urine. You want toilet jokes? You got them. Dozens! 
 
 But the film’s biggest disappointment is the main pairing. Cranston can make you laugh with a mouth twitch, and Franco is fully invested in Laird’s Zuckerberg-meets-Kanye act. They should make an ideal oppositional odd couple: Ned in his flannel shirt and khaki cords, Laird in his tank-top and drop-crotch yoga pants. But Why Him? can’t invest in their differences: It’s too focused on the idea that, deep down, they’re the same. “You and I have so much in common,” Laird tells Ned. And Stephanie announces that she loves her boyfriend because her boyfriend’s so much like her father. (The fact that Deutch gets out of that scene with any dignity intact makes me think she’s a few years from a few Oscars.) 
 
 Like a lot of R-rated comedies, Why Him? lands on the most G-rated ideals. All family problems and economic struggles can be overcome: After all, it is Christmas. But Why Him? has no fun along the way its central conflict. It’s built on smoke and mirrors. Moose urine, too. C ||||| FILM REVIEW 'Why Him?' 2.5 stars (out of 4) MPAA rating: R for strong language and sexual material throughout Cast: Bryan Cranston, James Franco, Zoey Deutch, Megan Mullally Director: John Hamburg Run time: 111 minutes 
 
 "Why Him?" is silly and derivative, a reverse-riff on "Meet the Parents" featuring more Japanese bidet-toilet jokes and moose-urine gags per square inch than any movie being released this week, easily. I recommend it with reservations, although I am also reserving the right to feel, someday, probably sooner rather than later, embarrassed for laughing at it as much as I did. 
 
 So it goes. This lighthearted, but never mean-spirited film, crass as it is, although not as crass as it could have been, features just enough inspired chemical comedy to elevate it a notch or two above others of its ilk. The blame and credit lies not with the same-old writing and jokes, but its principals. Bryan Cranston, who some would argue is better than this, is an uptight, non-ironic-sweatervest-wearing Midwestern dad, Ned Fleming. He butts heads with James Franco's West Coast, heavily tattooed, young-millionaire video-game developer dingbat, Laird Mayhew, who wants to marry Ned's sweetheart daughter, Steph (Zoey Deutch). 
 
 The Fleming family - Ned, his wife Barb (Megan Mullally) and teenage son Scotty (Griffin Gluck) - flies from their dork town of Grand Rapids, Mich. to Southern California, where they'll stay in Laird's ultramodern manse and celebrate Christmas. Their first impression of Laird was not great: a video chat with Steph featuring more of Laird's nude hindquarters than they wanted to see. When they finally meet "the man behind the crack" In person, they're appalled to hear him dropping F-bombs like he's a pigeon dropping droppings, i.e., constantly. He serves the Flemings edible paper and sea urchin burritos, and puts up mom and pop in a room decorated with paintings of rutting capybaras and creepy cat faces that make Van Gogh's self-portraits look like "Family Circus" comics. 
 
 Do hijinks ensue? Do pigeons like to drop droppings? Laird's manservant Gustav is the film's resident Scene Thief, played by Keegan-Michael Key, endearingly ridiculous as ever. Gustav is teaching Laird jiu-jitsu and parkour self-defense techniques by attacking him randomly and without warning - absurd slapstick scenes that are funnier than they have any right to be. Laird gets a huge back tattoo of the Fleming family's Christmas photo; Laird throws a banging Christmas party attended by Elon Musk; Laird mildly corrupts young Scotty, transforming him from Young Republican stiff to loose dope dude; Laird is a walking, talking, living, breathing hijink. 
 
 'Assassin's Creed' review: Michael Fassbender stars in a turgid waste of everybody's time 
 
 Cranston fluffs his feathers into a full fluster as Laird tries to bond with Ned, and win him over. Ned has difficulty embracing the guy's contradictions - Laird is a grating, big-hearted, loony weirdo with sympathetic parental issues, no filter, few personal boundaries and a very generous, gregarious soul, which all comes out in Franco's effortlessly funny performance. Laird is also disarmingly old-fashioned in some ways, bringing Ned to his office - a wigwam in the woods, of course - and asking for his blessing to marry Steph. 
 
 Laird may as well be asking for the moon, because Ned likes to keep Steph locked into his Fort Knox of an overprotective father's heart. See, Ned and Steph used to be two peas in a pod, but she's now an adult, 22 years old, and keeping secrets from him, Laird being the big one. Father and daughter share a few moments of heartfelt sincerity that ground "Why Him?", preventing it from being just a gag parade. Sure, they're fleeting moments, but not insignificant. 
 
 Otherwise, the women in the film are given very little to do. Barb gets wasted vaping weed, requiring Mullally to drops trou in an attempt to seduce her husband, who's too troubled by his daughter's choice of mate (or maybe those staring cat paintings) to go with it. And Deutch's bland character is nothing more than the Switzerland of the plot, negotiating between warring parties. 
 
 Of course, Ned is the lone stick in the mud, the odd man out, because he's the one with the struggling printing business, visiting an entirely paperless household. (I take that back. Laird's paper is edible, served as a side dish to the bear meat.) And yet, Ned sometimes seems to be almost enjoying himself at Laird's place, especially when he sees the twin-lane bowling alley he had installed just for his hopeful soon-to-be father-in-law. Is this inconsistency or complexity of character? Does it matter? Not really, as long as we laugh every so often. That's the only consistency we ask from movies like "Why Him?", which is funny in spite of its adherence to so many familiar generation-gap comedy tropes. It's at least better than "Son In Law," a comparison I make very, very lightly. 
 
 'Passengers' review: Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt flounder in sci-fi rom-com mess 
 
 'La La Land' review: Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone enchant us with wondrous song and dance 
 
 'Collateral Beauty' review: Will Smith anchors trite howler of a melodrama 
 
 ||||| Bryan Cranston and James Franco in Why Him? 
 
 It’s been a while since we’ve seen an onscreen character as thoroughly repulsive as Laird Mayhew, the grody, obsequious, and obscene tech millionaire played by James Franco in Why Him?. Perhaps this is a testament to Franco, an actor who’s often criticized for biting off more than he can chew; this time, he seems to be trying hard to craft a distinctive comedic personality. His success is our misfortune. 
 
 Covered in questionable tattoos, clad in baggy sweatpants, and prone to yelling about his dick at the top of his lungs, Laird is irritating both to look at and listen to. He has no chemistry with his college-aged girlfriend Stephanie (Zoey Deutch of Everybody Wants Some!!), preferring instead to hit on Stephanie’s mother (Megan Mullally, a trooper). To compensate for his overwhelming toxicity, Laird throws around his video-game fortune with Muammar Gaddafi–like abandon: His compound features TV-famous personal chefs, a home office that resembles an underwater lair, and tacky paintings and sculptures of animals having sex. What a catch. 
 
 As a gesture of good faith, Stephanie’s beleaguered father, Ned (Bryan Cranston), and the rest of the family — Mullally’s cheery matriarch Barb and well-mannered teenage son Scotty (Griffin Gluck) — decamp from their home in Grand Rapids to spend Christmas at Laird’s sprawling Silicon Valley mansion. The images that ensue might haunt you for all your days: a dead moose suspended in a pool of its own urine; a child motorboating his own father; a crude animation of a man being anally raped by a three-headed dragon with a rocket for a penis. Laird’s home is a Xanadu of vulgarity, absent any of the wit and comic timing that distinguishes Franco’s collaborations with Seth Rogen. You know all traces of goodwill have left the building when even Keegan-Michael Key, as a crisply efficient manservant with pointy sideburns, can’t muster much. 
 
 Director and co-writer John Hamburg also co-wrote all three Meet the Parents movies, and because Why Him? repeats that movie’s formula, the plot is eventually supposed to arrive at a plausible answer to its own question. We never get there. We do get Ned, quite reasonably, worrying that his daughter might be throwing her life away for a freakishly impulsive manchild. A better movie might have given Ned enough flaws to balance the equation, but all we see here is that he’s a bit of a stick-in-the-mud, and, because he runs a printing company, is also pretty tech-averse. Honestly, if guys like Laird are behind every iPhone app, more of us should go back to handwritten correspondence. 
 
 The question in this movie’s title gets a lot of use. A version of it could also apply to pretty much everyone involved, especially Cranston. The actor, who once brilliantly crafted the slow-burning tragedy of Walter White, is forced to mug helplessly through scenes where he’s sprayed in the face with toilet water. Why him? 
 
 You could keep asking “Why?” to the movie’s co-writer Jonah Hill (he has story credit) and producer Ben Stiller, both of whom have put their names on much better studio comedies than this one. You could even ask why the filmmakers had to drag in the great state of Michigan, which has been through enough already. 
 
 Like The Internship, the 2013 film that saw Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson attempt to get jobs at Google, Why Him? finds the tech lifestyle endlessly amusing. But apart from some bits about a smart home and a painful cameo by Elon Musk, the film doesn’t get its gas from the Valley itself, as much as from weak jokes about the stupid things that rich assholes spend money on. Laird wants Ned’s blessing to propose to Stephanie, and he’s so eager to please that he installs a bowling alley in his basement for the guy. “Regulation-sized,” muses Ned, whose own company is in the red. “That’s rare.” 
 
 Yeah, but so what? The only way this movie knows how to depict its hero as a good man is by showing that he occasionally spends his fortune on other people; redemption as a diversifying of assets. Wealth does not confer decency and should not excuse noxious behavior, and it is not a replacement for a soul. But it is, apparently, the final answer to the question in the movie’s title.
– "Maybe just see Rogue One again" seems to be the consensus from those who sat through holiday comedy Why Him?, which opens Friday. The Bryan Cranston and James Franco vehicle from a co-writer of Meet the Parents is currently 40% rotten on Rotten Tomatoes. Here's what critics are saying: Why Him? fails in part because it lacks Meet the Parents' patience with building comedic tension, according to Darren Franich at Entertainment Weekly. "The film wants to be a comedy of excess, but it just feels excessive ... You want toilet jokes? You got them. Dozens!" One of a handful of relatively few positive reviews, Bruce DeMara of the Toronto Star found Why Him? to be a "wildly entertaining jaunt" as long as you're "looking for light seasonal fare" packed to the gills with "ribald, gross-out humor." Richard Roeper at the Chicago Sun Times disagrees, to put it mildly, saying Why Him? is "in the bottom 1% of movies I've ever seen." It's "not funny, not funny, not funny, not funny, not funny" despite starring "two of the most gifted and versatile actors on the planet." And those actors have something to answer for. At the New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis says the film proves "definitively that slapping Mr. Franco's scenery-eating grin on any old drivel doesn't guarantee entertainment," especially when the script is "shoveling expletives into the holes where jokes ought to be." Meanwhile, Andrew Lapin at Vulture finds the film's title could rightly be asked of Cranston. "The actor, who once brilliantly crafted the slow-burning tragedy of Walter White, is forced to mug helplessly through scenes where he's sprayed in the face with toilet water. Why him?" Ending on a more positive note, John Serba at M Live recommends Why Him? "with reservations" and with an asterisk, saying he's also "reserving the right to feel, someday, probably sooner rather than later, embarrassed for laughing at it as much as I did."