There's a fine line you have to walk when you're making a farce; there needs to be a certain amount of bad tase, but you can't let it sink into mere vulgarity. Director Frank Oz and writer Dean Craig struggle, but don't find the right balance until far too late in the game
The setup is promising enough, as a proper British family gathers for the funeral of the family patriarch. Older son Daniel (Matthew MacFadyen) and his wife Jane (Keeley Hawes) are hosting the funeral; younger son Robert (Rupert Graves), a successful novelist, has flown in from New York. There are assorted uncles, aunts, and nieces, and there's Peter (Peter Dinklage), a mysterious stranger whom none of the family has ever met.
The first half of the movie is overly polite and restrained, there's an occasional smile to be found, but no real laughs. When the movie does head into bad-taste territory, it becomes crudely disgusting, which isn't any funnier than the excessive restraint of the earlier scenes. (Without giving away too many details, let's just say that any scene beginning with an elderly man in a wheelchair asking to be taken to the toilet is not going to end well.)
There are some things that work. Murray Gold's score strikes just the right note of sprightly vulgarity, and Alan Tudyk does marvelous things with the stock character of Guy Who's Been Inadvertently Slipped Hallucinogenic Drugs. In the last fifteen minutes, Oz and Craig even manage to get the right balance of sentiment and tackiness, but it's too little, too late. Wait for cable or DVD if you absolutely must see this; it certainly isn't worth paying full price at the multiplex.
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