House Broken (2009)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

In this very offensive and unsuitable for viewing film, Danny Devito and Katey Segal are the parents of two lazy-bottom young men. Devito retires from the Fire Dept after 25 years and, at that point, realizes how shiftless his kids are. Wife has been taking care of the them for years. So, Devito kidnaps his wife and takes the camper out of town, to stay until the young adult sons learn how to take care of themselves. Admittedly, there are a few laughs at the beginning. When the fire truck escorts newly retired Devito home, an energetic cheerleader-gymnast does handsprings right into the fire truck! In that same scene, the VERY challenged sons manage to turn the main water spout on full blast, shoving a young girl on a tricycle against a wall. But, not long after that, very offensive language and scenes start to add up and this viewer had to turn it off and pitch it into a waste basket. What a shame, since the premise was clever and Devito is always a funny, funny man. When a film advertised for general viewing should have been given an NC-17 rating, that's a big problem.

I bought this movie because I thought Danny DeVito would be in the lead role, as he was on the front of the DVD cover along with his name. But it turned out that this was just a teenage comedy, and not an impressive one at that, with Danny DeVito in a supporting role only.The story is about two slacker sons, Quinn and Elliot, who live at home and is making their father's life miserable, especially after he retired from his work at the fire department. Coming up with a plan to teach his sons about life and responsibilities, the retired father and his wife go away camping and leave the sons to fend for themselves.I clearly wasn't the target audience for "House Broken", because I found the type of comedy infantile and the story more annoying than interesting. As such, I didn't particularly enjoy this movie very much.The bright points to "House Broken" were Danny DeVito, Katey Sagal, Matthew Glave and Thomas F. Wilson.If you enjoy a good comedy, then "House Broken" is hardly the best of choices.

These two spoiled and jobless Southern Cal dudes (Hansen and Stone), each brother about twenty-five or so, are left home alone while their parents (DeVito and Sagal) take a vacation from them. They're mentally blank to the point at which they don't know that you must pay an electric bill or the power goes off, see? So they visit a supermarket where a girl friend of theirs (Crosby) works. The manager happens at the moment to be finishing the arrangement of a large plate of sampler cheese cubes with toothpicks stuck in them. The manager is what they would call a real douche bag. He insults everyone freely, calls Crosby "tits" and "C cup." He fires Crosby in front of the two dudes, saying, "She stepped outside her box, and by 'box' I mean vagina, get it?" So the taller of the two dudes yanks down his phat pants, hops up on the table, plops his bare rear end onto the platter of cheese, wriggles his behind down into them for what seems like several geological epochs, and says something like, "How do you like THOSE cheese cubes?" The other dude picks up a cheese cube, pops it into his mouth, and comments on their savory quality.Now, if you think this is funny, this is your movie.The whole movie is like that. It does its best to be outrageous -- and I guess it IS that -- in an attempt to imitate the Farrelly brothers' successful earlier efforts by coupling it with the cash-generating "Home Alone," but it does so with witless abandon. The S word is used freely. So is the D word and the F bomb and the B word. ("B" as in, "blue B***s," which Danny DeVito, a man over fifty, claims to be suffering from.) The writers manage to avoid the Q word and the X word and the Z word but only because there aren't any that are dirty, unless you count "quoit", which I'm tempted but unwilling to do.What? You say that's not funny enough? Okay. How about this. One of the brothers is sleeping and the other sneaks up and begins to rub a plastic phallus around his face. The sleeping dude yawns and the dude who is awake inserts the phallus between his teeth. The sleeper wakes up, the other dude hides the phallus behind his back, and -- the payoff? "Did you just put something in my mouth?" "No." That's the joke, the whole joke, and nothing but the joke -- the joke being that there really is no joke. The scene has no point, no capsheaf. The minute or so in which we see plastic on nose is itself supposed to keep you laughing. The writers haven't bothered to build the scene to any sort of peak or climax. They don't think you care. They think your sensitivity is that of a bowling ball, rather like the two airheads who star in this offal.If it does, if you even smile at this description of the incident, this is the movie for you.

After you've watched this movie, you can call it both ways, especially after Danny Devito's 2 sons, Ryan Hansen as Elliot, and Skyler Stone as Quinn, are done. Talk about what have to be the most nerdy, brainless, half-witted, clueless and screw-balled airheads - these 2 and their pack of equally dumb friends. Their girlfriends weren't much better either.It was a pleasure, though, to see Danny DeVito once again. After all these years, he proves that he hasn't lost his touch, ever so excellent. That expression he has when arching his brow and puckering his lips, signaling he's about to drum up something, cracks me up still just as it did way back when he made Twins with Arnold Schwarzenegger. In this movie, boy does he have a handful with his dysfunctional misfits, an airhead of a wife not willing to live without "her boys", a wacky neighbor in the persona of Tom Wilson (yes, the very same "Biff" from Back to the Future), and a firefighter friend he hires with a pet snake to scare off the Brady bunch (John Farley as "Nate").But our hero, now ex-Fire Chief and Firefighter Captain, has no intention of spending his retirement accompanied by screwballs, be they his sons or not. Oh no! he has a whole plan drawn up to teach these guys to be men, and move on. Does he succeed? Well, you'll have to find out.What I take exception to is the constant and varied sexual innuendos, not played down either - but really crass and crude. There were several moments where public references to both male and female genitalia were made; I do not see what this had to do with the plot, or how it contributed to the story, other than cheapening it unnecessarily. Lots of dildos illustrating their function - at one time, the elder plays at putting one in his brother's mouth while sleeping. There was a scene with a dummy which I thought sick and unnecessary, and the list goes on.This, primarily, is what prompted my low score. It isn't a flick you'll want to watch with your family, especially not young kids. So if you watch this, make sure whomever is with you (if anyone) is mature enough and will not take undue offense at such portrayal of what nowadays is called 'humor'.That being said, a few laughs and giggles are on the menu, tainted, sadly, with a lot of mindless humor and crude language/behavior.