'The House': Film Review

Amy Poehler and Will Ferrell try to pay for their kid's college with a homemade casino in Andrew Jay Cohen's directing debut.

A couple of desperate, super-square parents embrace their inner badass in The House, turning a friend's abode into a full-service casino to raise around five hundred grand in a few weeks. Sound unlikely? You don't know the half of it. Having penned two surprisingly funny parents-gone-wild hits with writing partner Brendan O'Brien (Neighbors and its sequel), Andrew Jay Cohen makes his directing debut with this variation on the theme. But the third time is anything but charmed for this luckless effort, which is unlikely to return even close to what producers expected when they teamed Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler with the successful screenwriters.

It's telling that Warner Bros. is sneaking this release out sans critics' screenings despite its well-liked stars: This House will likely collapse under its word-of-mouth burden.

Where Neighbors stars Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen played new parents, comically unsure they were equipped to care for a newborn, Poehler and Ferrell's Kate and Scott Johansen are old hands, the kind of sweet dorks who believe they're their daughter's best friends and may actually be right. Much in the picture's first half-hour puts one in mind not of the earlier films' rite-of-passage friction but of "why isn't this funny?" star vehicles about middle-aged misbehavior like 2010's Date Night. It might help, this time around, if we believed an ounce of the setup.......

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