Keeping Up with the Joneses

Starring: Zach Galifianakis, Isla Fisher, Jon Hamm, Gal Gadot

Directed By: Greg Mottola

Written By: Micahel LeSieur

Reviewed by Brendan Dousi

[rating: 1/5]
When looking at its pieces separately, Keeping Up with the Joneses has the potential to be an alright movie. Let’s ignore the below average trailer and see what we have on offer. There’s a talented cast who have all, give or take a Gal Gadot, proven themselves in the comedic field. There’s a proven director, Greg Mottola, who gave us a few great coming of age stories (Adventureland, Superbad) and we have a spy-next-door premise, it’s been done before, but there’s plenty of opportunity for comedy. Unfortunately, it seems this mix of potentially great ingredients have combusted into what has to be one of the worst cinematic offerings of 2016.
From the get-go, Keeping Up with the Joneses positively screams out cheap and lazy. Within the first minute we are treated to a blowing up house and then force-fed a tired ‘two weeks earlier’ trope, not to mention the voice-over which seems like it’s only purpose was to set up the movie in the laziest possible way because it’s never used as a device again in the rest of the film. It just sits there, an awkward disembodied voice introducing you to the shit-show you’re about to suffer through. What comes next is a paint-by-numbers twist-less plot of convenience, a story that doesn’t even begin to attempt to innovate, subvert or improve on anything that has come before it. I won’t even bother going into details about what happens in the film because simply saying the premise, “It’s about a guy who works for a missile tech company, his wife and some mysterious spy neighbours move in next door” gives you all you need to know. Think of the most basic and obvious plot you can for that scenario. That’s what happens.
I feel incredibly sorry for the cast of this film, because they are all great performers in their own right who do their best with the soggy biscuit of a script they have to work with. Any semblance of enjoyment you can squeeze out of this film, apart from those easily amused by rudimentary slapstick, comes from the chemistry between the main performers. Zach Galifianakis plays a charming and convincing every-man and he bounces off his paranoid wife Isla Fisher well. They have chemistry and work better as a couple than I expected. Gal Gadot comes in playing suburban Wonder Woman and it plays well, especially when playing off of Fishers slightly manic energy. The stand-out, of course, is Jon Hamm who oozes so much sex appeal that you could put him in a scene with an empty chair and still feel the romantic energy. One of the more redeeming qualities of this film is the relationship between Galifianakis and Hamm’s characters that start to develop a somewhat convincing male bond thanks to the efforts of these two great performers.
Alas, even great performances can only reanimate the corpse of a lifeless script for so long before it starts to fall apart. There’s a process studios like to do with comedy scripts where they take it in front of a panel of comedians and get them to insert jokes to increase the potential amount of jokes. The more jokes, the more laughs, the more people enjoy the film. It seems that not only did they not even bother with this process, but the original scriptwriter, Michael LeSieur, must have had his placeholder lines still in place when they went to shoot. I honestly sat there for half the film wondering if half the lines were actually meant to be jokes. They weren’t even bad attempts at jokes. They were just lines that sat there, lifeless and limp, where a joke was supposed to be. It was almost surreal. What’s even more confusing is the visual choices in this film. I’ve seen Mottola’s work before, it’s nothing to write home about, but it’s never looked this bad. This movie literally looks like a CBS sitcom. It’s bright, glaring and hideous with an awkward haze that made me start to question whether I actually might need glasses.
With absolutely no single attempt at imagination, innovation or even minimum effort to make this at least a passable comedy, Keeping up with the Joneses fails miserably at everything it doesn’t bother setting out to achieve. Despite its talented cast, this hideous and offensively boring film deserves to fade into obscurity as quickly as possible. I can only assume this film even saw the light of day as some kind of tax write-off, that’s the only explanation I can think of for such a lacklustre effort. I strongly recommend you all to not bother Keeping up with the Joneses.