Of all the guys his daughter could have chosen...
Why Him? (2016)
A dad forms a bitter rivalry with his daughter's young rich boyfriend.
rating 6/10 User rating 4,350 votes 64% ❄ Christmas Connection
Why Him? is set almost entirely over Christmas break, with the Fleming family flying out to California for the holidays. The holiday setting isn't incidental: the Christmas dinner table confrontations, the gift-giving disasters, and the family-togetherness pressure are all load-bearing plot devices. It's a Christmas movie the same way National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is: Christmas is the reason the family collision happens at all.
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Our Review
The premise of Why Him? (2016) is built on a recognizable anxiety: your daughter brings home a guy who has more money than taste, more confidence than sense, and absolutely no filter. In Ned Fleming's case (Bryan Cranston), that guy is Laird Mayhew (James Franco), a Silicon Valley gaming billionaire who fills his house with taxidermied animals and Japanese toilets, covers his arms in tattoos, and cannot complete a sentence without the word "bro." Ned has to survive Christmas at Laird's compound. The movie correctly identifies this as a horror scenario.
Director John Hamburg has made this kind of comedy before. He co-wrote Meet the Parents and directed Along Came Polly. He understands that the engine of cringe comedy is specificity: the funnier the detail, the harder the wince. Why Him? runs that engine hard.
What the Movie Actually Gets Right
The casting is the best decision the film makes. Cranston plays Ned with the kind of coiled dignity a man maintains when he suspects he's already losing. He runs a printing business in Michigan, he drives a sensible car, he has opinions about handshakes. He is not equipped for Laird. Every time Cranston's face processes something new and appalling about his daughter's boyfriend, the movie earns its laugh.
Franco, meanwhile, commits fully to a character who is almost impossible to play straight. Laird is not a villain and not quite a buffoon. He's a man with genuinely good intentions who has lived so long without consequences that he's lost track of normal human calibration. Franco makes that readable. You understand why Stephanie (Zoey Deutch) loves him, even as her father does not.
Keegan-Michael Key, as Laird's intense house manager Gustav, steals every scene he's in. Gustav is technically a butler, but operates more like a personal trainer who has read too many samurai novels. His subplot is thin but Key makes it count.
The Christmas Setting Pulls Its Weight
Hollywood comedies sometimes drop the holidays in as wallpaper. Not here. The Christmas break structure is functional. It's the reason the Flemings are trapped at Laird's compound for days rather than hours. It creates the gift-giving sequence that produces the film's best extended joke. It puts Ned and Laird at a dinner table together repeatedly, which is where their conflict actually lives.
The movie doesn't do much with Christmas aesthetics. Laird's house has the kind of over-the-top tech-bro holiday decor you'd expect, but Hamburg isn't interested in sentimentality. This is not a film that ends with snow falling and everyone learning to love differently. It ends with something louder and messier, which is the right call.
Where It Strains
At 111 minutes, Why Him? runs long for what it's doing. The second act sags in places where better editing would have helped. A subplot about Ned's printing business facing obsolescence tries to give the film a more serious undertow, but it sits awkwardly next to the gross-out comedy surrounding it.
Some gags also push past the point of return. The film's most notorious set piece involves an eco-friendly toilet system and a moose. It's built for maximum shock, and it achieves that. Whether that's a compliment depends on your appetite for escalation. The movie knows exactly what it is and doesn't apologize for it, which is at least honest.
Megan Mullally as Ned's wife Barb gets significantly more to do in the film's back half than the front, and her chemistry with Cranston feels genuinely lived-in. The movie is better every time it lets them interact as a couple rather than as plot functionaries.
The Bottom Line on Why Him?
This is a R-rated Christmas comedy that delivers what it promises: two very different men in extended conflict, performed by actors good enough to make it work. It's not trying to be Christmas Vacation and it's not trying to be a Judd Apatow film. It sits somewhere in between, coarser than the former and less emotionally ambitious than the latter.
On a $52 million budget, the film earned $118 million worldwide. Audiences responded to it more warmly than critics did, and that gap is telling. Critics wanted it to be smarter. Audiences wanted it to be funny. It is, consistently enough, funny.
The fact that director John Hamburg was James Franco's actual professor at NYU before making this movie together is somehow the most Silicon Valley thing about the whole production.
Fun Facts
Director John Hamburg was James Franco's film professor at New York University before the two later collaborated on this movie.
Many of the paintings hanging in Laird's house were actually created by James Franco himself. The closing credits acknowledge his artwork, which appears in several of his films.
Megan Mullally later revealed that the cast was given extensive freedom to improvise. Around 240 hours of footage was shot in total, which had to be cut down to the film's 90-minute runtime.
The intimate bedroom scene between Megan Mullally and Bryan Cranston was not written into the original script. Mullally proposed it herself during rehearsals, and Hamburg agreed to include it.
The story was conceived by Jonah Hill, who also served as a producer alongside Shawn Levy and Ben Stiller. Ian Helfer co-wrote the screenplay with Hamburg.
The film was released on December 23, 2016, just two days before Christmas, and grossed $118.1 million worldwide against a $52 million production budget.
Principal photography began in mid-February 2016 in Los Angeles. The crew also shot street scenes in Grand Rapids, Michigan, using a camera-rigged car with at least two police escorts.
Laird's mansion in the film is located on Summit Drive in Beverly Hills, a real property used as the primary shooting location for the estate's exterior and grounds.
Cast
