By Emilio Frenk.
Director: Greg Mottola
Cast: Zach Galifianakis, Isla Fisher, Jon Hamm, Gal Gadot, Matt Walsh, Maribeth Monroe and Patton Oswalt.
Rating: Poor
Greg Mottola, director of “Superbad” brings “Keeping up with the Joneses” and this comedy is not even close to Mottola’s previous work.
The movie centers the life of Jeff Gaffney (Zach Galifianakis) and his wife Karen (Isla Fisher), a suburban couple who one day they meet their new neighbors: Tim Jones (Jon Hamm) and his wife Natalie (Gal Gadot).
The four of them begin an interesting friendship but everything will change when Karen begins to notice that Natalie is a spy and Jeff begins to notice the same thing towards Tim.
Now that they know the truth about the Joneses, now both the Gaffney’s and the Joneses need to be together too stay alive at all costs before it’s too late.
The major problem that I saw in “Keeping up with the Joneses” was the fact that the movie had bits of humour; but at the end became to predictable and less funny.
One of the things that this genre is too generous is that you can be be predictable but of course there are limits and this was to excesive.
The script written by Michael LeSieur, who wrote comedies like “You, Me and Dupree” and “The Maiden Heist” had the goods but they were not shown on the film.
Greg Mottola know’s how to direct this type of movies. For instance “Superbad” was a really good, funny and sweet film and has memorable characters like Mclovin, played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse. Here the main problem is that once the second act of the film began everything stopped being funny.
I was excited when I saw the name of Greg Mottola as a director of this film since I loved “Superbad” and “Adventureland” but this was’nt even close.
The premise of the film was very interesting and had a lot of potential for not only to be funny, but at the same time to have characters that you would remember in the comedy genre. Also the movie had four talented actors like Zach Galifianakis, who I previously mentioned is one of the funniest men in comedy, Isla Fisher, Jon Hamm who by moments I saw the same performance as Don Draper in the show “Mad Men” which catapulted his career and Gal Gadot who had very funny moments in this movie, despite being her first comedic role.
I hope this is a huge learning lesson for Greg Mottola and I want to see more of his movies since I consider him, Nicholas Stoller and Judd Apatow the best comedy directors in the industry.
With that being said “Keeping up with the Joneses” is one of the worst movies and comodies of this year due to the direction, performance and lack of jokes the movie offers.