PRINTMovie Review: Wanderlust
Drugs, hippies and gratuitous male nudity . . . oh, my.
Courtesy of Universal Pictures.
Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd stumble upon a hippie commune in Wanderlust.
February 25, 2012 | 11:14 a.m. CST
Wanderlust is a by-the-numbers comedy. It plays out a lot like last year’s Hall Pass, with common elements of relationship stress, drugs, extramarital sex and male frontal nudity but adds a hippie commune . . . just because it can.
In Wanderlust, Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston play a couple from New York that suddenly suffers from massive financial problems. They decide to move in with Rudd’s obnoxious brother in Atlanta, Georgia, but they get sidetracked along the way and end up visiting a hippie commune. Before long, they become a part of it.
Rudd has come a long way since Clueless. He has a great everyman quality and can change gears from cocky to insecure with minimal effort. His absolute funniest moment in the film involves talking dirty in a mirror to psych himself up for sex.
Aniston, on the other hand, is just kind of irritating. She has some funny scenes as well, especially when she starts tripping out on hallucinogenic tea, but her willingness to dive straight into the hippie culture is too forced.
Wanderlust also contains a startling amount of male nudity, which is unsurprising considering Judd Apatow (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) is a producer. The nudist character is quite obnoxious at first, but he ultimately becomes one of the more endearing characters.
Other characters of note include Alan Alda as the forgetful patriarch of the commune, Malin Akerman (Watchmen) as a seductive hippie chick, and Aniston’s real-life boyfriend Justin Theroux as Seth, a deviously smarmy guru figure who has his eye on Aniston. Ray Liotta also cameos as himself in the end sequence.
The film has its laughs, but all the pieces do not come together to make a satisfying whole. The subplot of greedy developers wanting to turn the commune into a casino is predictable and fails to rally the audience to the side of the hippies. The marital stress between Rudd and Aniston could really have been dropped into any scenario; it renders the commune setting kind of pointless except as a vehicle for gross-out gags. Because, apparently, you can’t show a farm without excrement jokes.
Vox Rating:
