By William Wolf

WANDERLUST  Send This Review to a Friend

Directed by David Wain, “Wanderlust” is more gross than funny and typifies the silly type of comedies coming out of Hollywood these days. The screenplay by Wain and Ken Marino operates on the premise that talking about penises is hilarious and that a couple stumbling into a commune and struggling to live among the nature addicts is also supposed to have you in the aisles. I suppose that if you think “Bridesmaids” a riot, you may also enjoy “Wanderlust,” but those who prefer their comedies to have at least a smattering of wit may find sitting though this wallow in tastelessness excruciating.

Sure, there are occasional laughs. Linda Lavin in bit role as a real estate broker is funny. A flock of naked people of all shapes and sizes running with flab flopping earns a laugh. And the first time you see a naked commune resident with his penis dangling may tickle your funny bone, but his repeated nakedness is a diminishing return. This is the sort of gross film in which trying to have a bowel movement with others watching is supposed to make you bust a gut laughing.

Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston play a couple, George and Linda, who are restless city folk, and while hitting the road come upon a commune. The inhabitants are so extreme that they make 1960s communes look like seminars. The intended humor stems from watching the couple’s attempt to integrate into the lifestyle. Each dopey episode leads to another exercise in heavy-handed quests for laughs. Ultimately, the couple’s differences surface. She wants to stay, he wants to leave, especially after she adopts the commune’s open sex practice. Linda has sex with a guy who turns out to be creep, but George becomes so frenetic when a hot-looking woman offers herself to him that he scares her off.

Mix in a plot about casino developers trying to seize the land and Alan Alda, moving about in a wheelchair and one of the founders of the commune, searching for the deed to prove legal ownership.

All of this strained nonsense seems to go on forever. A Universal Pictures release.

  

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