Movie review: Sisters is sibling revelry

By Jay Stone

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are one of the great female comedy teams, a title in no way qualified by the fact that may be the only female comedy team. Their performances as hosts of the Saturday Night Live news desk and the Golden Globe awards is a good indication of their humour: witty, loopy, with an undercurrent of the naughty competition that arises when smart women are thrown into the (alas) crude frat-boy culture of modern comedy.

In Sisters, their third movie together (after Baby Mama and something called Martin & Orloff), the witty is pretty well abandoned in favour of loopy and a big dose of crude. Most of the movie is set at a wild party at which Kate (Fey) and Maura (Poehler) — the Ellis sisters — have taken over their parent’s empty house and invited all their old high school friends. Disaster ensues, accompanied by drugs, sex, the stumblebum antics of the old class clown and a larger-than-expected supporting turn by Fey’s breasts, which play peek-a-boo with the censor board. Kate, it turns out, was something of a class Jezebel, not to say a slut.

The result is supposed to be amusing in that vulgar way of a series of bad-boy (from Old School to The Night Before) and bad-girl (Bridesmaids) comedies. Fey and Poehler are great together, as always, but their take on sisterhood is a disappointing synergy of lame-brained sexual aggression and a mushy “redemption” about the importance of family, which rides in at the last moment to save the day, not to mention’s Fey’s modesty.

Kate is a divorced hairstylist with a teenage daughter who is constantly getting fired or quitting her jobs. Maura is a single nurse who wants to save the world: in the opening sequence, she sees a homeless man on a street corner and sprays him with sunscreen. Her pet is a rescue dog, which she is training “to smell diabetes.”

The sisters are drawn back together when their parents (James Brolin and Dianne Weist) announce that they’re selling the family home and moving to an adult-only community, a place from which this movie would be disqualified. The two women arrive to clean out their childhood detritus and decide to have one last bash; one of the famous “Ellis Island” parties that made them famous back in the day.

Hilarity doesn’t ensue. For instance, Kate and Maura go to a dress shop to find just the right outfits and Fey tries on a halter-top backwards, an early indication that Sisters is going to be boob-friendly. They finally decide they need “a little less Forever 21 and a little more suddenly 42,” a surprisingly clear acknowledgement that everyone in the movie — written by SNL’s Paula Pell — is too old for this kind of nonsense.

The party itself is a reunion of old friends, including Maya Rudolph of Bridesmaids (as Brinda, an old high school enemy); Ike Barinholtz (as James, the hunky neighbor who might be able to reclaim Maura’s sex life) and Bobby Moynihan (as Alex the overbearing comic) of SNL; and John Leguizamo (of pretty well everything, it seems) as Alex an over-the-hill Lothario. There’s also a bit by the preposterously large John Cena as Pazuzu, a drug dealer who shows up with an encyclopedic pharmacopeia of every illegal drug you’ve heard of and a few you have not. Cena’s muscles are amusingly large.

Director Jason Moore (Pitch Perfect) doesn’t so much pull all these threads together as throw them against the wall, in the manner of Alex straining for laughs by drawing graffiti of huge male genitalia on the living room wall. It’s like a stale-dated version of Project X, the teen film about an out-of-control house party. Whatever sticks is thanks to the easy chemistry between Fey and Poehler, who seem simultaneously giddy with the chance to be so naughty and far too smart for such stupidity. It feels like they’ve given up.

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