Filmmakers learned years ago that sex in any form sells movies. Any genre, any time period – throw in a leggy blonde in a tight dress or a saucy nude scene and it’s guaranteed to be talked about. This is yet another concept, that if pulled off well, can make a film. True Lies for example showed us one of the funniest strip scenes in all of film. Hall Pass goes the other direction though by making a film about a couple of man-children acting like 13 year olds.
Owen Wilson (Little Fockers) and Jason Sudeikis (Saturday Night Live) play Rick and Fred, two middle aged men in the suburbs. They live in a happy suburban bliss that only the upper middle class can afford, dressing like Gap models and going home every night to their happy middle age suburban wives. Their only complaint in life is that they’re not getting enough sex, something they never stop talking about throughout the show.
Eventually their wives get fed up with their obsession and take the advice of a neighborhood psychologist. Both wives give their husbands a “hall pass,” a week off of marriage where they can just go out and have all the sex they want in order to get it out of their system. Wilson and Sudeikis spend the rest of the movie trying to get laid.
It’s hard to figure out who this movie was made for. It’s so beyond immature that most adults would be turned off by it, yet the intricacies of the marriage thing would go above most 13 year old boys. Where most films just hint at or make references to some subjects, Hall Pass goes ahead and shows the audience all the filthy details. For example, Hall Pass is one of the few non-pornographic films to feature full frontal male nudity. Not a bulge, like in You don’t mess with the Zohan, or a little “animatronics” thing like in Love and other Drugs. It’s full on, throw it all out there nudity. Due to the extremity in size, I suspect prosthetics – but still out there all the same.
Another atrocity the film brings to the table is the full on poop scenes. There aren’t just one but two scenes of people making duty in places that most definitely aren’t toilets. Between these unappealing scenes and a part with Sudeikis vigorously masturbating, it’s a wonder if the film even wants people to watch it at all.
Wilson and Sudeikis are so unappealing as characters that the movie just ends up being an overall waste of time. Between trying to find sexual conquests, all the pair does is sit around in their underwear and talk about sex while watching movies their wives won’t let them watch. This film plays out like a midlife crisis fantasy for boring businessmen with six kids and a mortgaged home, where they can watch and say “Oh I wish my wife would let me do that” or “I’m so glad I’m smarter than the writers of this film think I am.”
Hall Pass is rated R for poop scenes, a dreadful and gratuitous masturbation scene, a lot of sex talk, an explicit sex scene and language.
