Why Him? review: Good cast, shame about the comedy

You’re eager for a film satirising the vanity and self-absorption of tech millionaires. Right? You like the idea of an ordinary Joe rubbing up against a loaded solipsist in Silicon Valley. Yes? If I’ve read the situation wrong, then this isn’t 2005 any more.

John Hamburg's belated comedy on this very theme suffers from too many of American comedy's contemporary afflictions. Why Him? is cleverly cast, and its personal dynamics are cleanly drawn.

James Franco will do well enough as a wealthy videogame designer with an expensively gimmicky house. Bryan Cranston makes sense as the Michiganian dad who, visiting his daughter at Stanford, discovers that she is engaged to (and more or less living with) the tattooed multimillionaire. Lovely Megan Mullally is mum. The rising Zoey Deutch plays the daughter.

The screenwriters have, in the Franco character, isolated a rare modern type. These classes of computer magnates often go straight from school to mansion without ever having to engage with everyday people. He’s not a bad sort. He’s kind to his fiance and sincerely wants Cranston and crew to be comfortable. But nobody has told him that not everybody enjoys endless swearing and unfettered openness about sex. His attitudes are no less exclusionary than Cranston’s suburban mores.

The stars have fun with those tensions for the opening 20 minutes, but, like the recent Office Christmas Party, Why Him? does not have nearly enough screenplay to fill up its groaning running time. The cast are reduced to endless improvisations that fail to make much of comic riffs that aren't very funny in the first place.

Cranston’s engagement with an automatic lavatory seems to last longer than winter. Mullally’s stoned seduction of her husband curls toes for the wrong reasons. The older couple’s promiscuous references to Kiss point towards inevitable cameos that only serve to extend an already protracted conclusion. What happened to scripts in US mainstream comedy?

We do not predict a lifespan to compare with that of Meet the Parents.

Game over.