Much in the picture’s first half-hour puts one in mind not of the earlier films’ rite-of-passage friction but of “why isn’t this funny?” star vehicles about middle-aged misbehavior like 2010’s Date Night. Where Neighbors stars Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen played new parents, comically unsure they were equipped to care for a newborn, Poehler and Ferrell’s Kate and Scott Johansen are old hands, the kind of sweet dorks who believe they’re their daughter’s best friends and may actually be right.
But the third time is anything but charmed for this luckless effort, which is unlikely to return even close to what producers expected when they teamed Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler with the successful screenwriters. Having penned two surprisingly funny parents-gone-wild hits with writing partner Brendan O’Brien ( Neighbors and its sequel), Andrew Jay Cohen makes his directing debut with this variation on the theme. Sound unlikely? You don’t know the half of it. A couple of desperate, super-square parents embrace their inner badass in The House, turning a friend’s abode into a full-service casino to raise around 500 grand in a few weeks.