What a waste of talent.
Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler are funny people. With the right material, they are laugh-out-loud funny people.
THE HOUSE never generates more than a mild chuckle however, filled with lazy writing, a strange moral compass and more lapses in logical storytelling than the latest Michael Bay film.
After their college bound daughter's scholarship is passed over at the last minute by their town council, Scott & Kate (Will & Amy) realize they've saved nothing and have no resources to fund college.
Thanks to lazy writing that you can hear constantly grinding in the background to set up the next unfulfilled opportunity for laughs, they conspire with their separated friend Frank (a mildly amusing Jason Mantzoukas) to build a casino in his house.
This leads to every predictable scenario you can think of immediately and nothing more creative than that.
Nick Kroll (The League) has some good moments as Bob, the most hapless city manager ever, but the film suffers from a real lack of consistency and being completely disconnected from any real life consequences that any of these people would suffer.
If there are no rules and no consequences, why do we care? When a movie about gambling doesn't define the stakes, things are off to a bad start.
It's just dumb.
At less than 90 minutes long, it's got about 2 minutes of humor. It feels like a bad Saturday Night Skit stretched beyond any human endurance.
There are several scenes of violence so severe that they go way past the ability to be funny.
You know how THE HOUSE always wins? Not this time. This absurd stinker gets a D.
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