Hall Pass is a movie with a lot of potential, and a decent amount of laughs, undone by a lack of clear vision as to what sort of movie it wants to be. It is at turns a tender and heartfelt comedy and a raunchy gross out comedy. Had it stuck to one or the other, or better yet, managed to blend the two together it could have been great. Sadly, the tones remained distinct and neither one feels earned or fitting.

After a couple of incidents of getting caught checking out other women and a very, very inappropriate conversation caught on tape at a dinner party Rick (Owen Wilson) finds himself in hot water with his wife Maggie (Jenna Fischer) and the two realize that their marriage is floundering. Maggie takes questionable advice and decides that the problem with their cooled off sex life is that Rick just needs to get out there and have some fresh tang so she issues him a hall pass, a week long break from their marriage wherein Rick can do anything or anyone he wants and she is going to take the kids up to her parents’ place. When Rick’s best friend Fred (Jason Sudeikis) catches wind of this he wants in on the action and manages to convince his wife Grace (Christina Applegate) that he needs a hall pass too. With wives safely away the two men set out to try to make their dreams come true with the women at Appleby’s while their buddies come out to watch the action go down. Things don’t go smoothly, mistakes are made and lessons are learned. Oh and there is also some full frontal male nudity and very explosive diarrhea.

When Hall Pass is funny it is very, very funny and there are some set pieces here that are really great but the problem is that the connective tissue between these moments tend to stretch longer than they should and too often stray into over-sentimentality. The Farrelly brothers usually do a good job of injecting a little heart into their movies without overdoing it but here it is like a patch work quilt of clashing colors that just never works right. The problem lies, I think, with suspension of disbelief. If you set up the rules for the world and don’t break them then you can get away with some pretty crazy things so long as they are consistent. If, however, you establish your story in something closely resembling the real world in which not everyone is crazy and then inject a bunch of completely unhinged people doing over the top things it tends to be jarring and knock you out of the movie.

So if I am watching a movie that starts delving into a guy’s feelings of sadness for missing his wife and a real reluctance to be with anyone else not because it is against the rules but just because it wouldn’t feel right and would tarnish what they have together and then a drunk woman launches a metric ton of liquid shit onto the wall of a bathroom I am really thrown off balance and not in a good and funny way. Is it possible that this sort of thing could happen? I suppose, but if you haven’t established that this is the sort of comedy you are going to be doing earlier on it is really jarring. And no, the fat guy taking a shit in a sand trap at a golf course is not proper set up for this.

It feels like they just couldn’t decide on what movie they were making and instead of settling or blending it they just threw it all at the wall to see what would stick and unfortunately it ends up looking about as good as the aforementioned explosive diarrhea. It isn’t that the movie is terrible but it just feels uneven and ultimately unsatisfying.

It is really too bad that the movie goes this way. There are tons of places the dramatic elements could go if that is what they wanted to do with it without inserting poop and dangling dicks all over the place. Or if they wanted a poop and dangling dicks picture there is plenty of crazy things they could do there and just go full on raunchy comedy with it (sort of like any of their other movies) and it could have been great. As it is, I don’t know who this movie is meant for and it is kind of baffling to me.

On the performance end, everyone does a really good job. Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis have great chemistry and it is hard not to like their characters even at their most rakish. Jenna Fischer and Christina Applegate do a good job of acting as if this ridiculous idea is a good one and then feeling regret for how bad things go and how stupid it all was to begin with. They also do a good job of acting as if they don’t have 4,000 gallons of self tanner on their faces. I am not sure what is up with that but there are some really tan people in this movie and it is a little frightening.

For my money the best reason to see this movie is Stephen Merchant. The lesser-known co-creator of the British Office and Ricky Gervais’s constant co-writer, Merchant is hilarious. He is underused here to a criminal degree until a sequence during the closing credits that made me wish the movie would have been about him and his wife instead of Rick and Fred.

Conclusion [6.5 out of 10]

The worst thing about Hall Pass is how good the good parts are. They are so good that it makes you really wish the whole thing was like that and you get a glimpse of what might have been. This movie isn’t terrible but I can’t recommend it with a clear conscience given how uneven it is. It is worth a look as a rental and maybe as a matinee but I would never suggest paying full price.