Review: Sisters

Amy and Tina. Fey and Poehler. The former Saturday Night Livers have branded themselves as the gold standard of female friendship over the years. Garnering individual acclaim for their critically beloved sitcoms (Fey with 30 Rock, Poehler with Parks and Recreation), they have combined their comedic superpowers hosting and presenting various awards shows, entertaining the Hollywood glitterati with their witty barbs. They're practically national treasures at this point, but it's often easy to forget that their pairings on film have yet to be wholly satisfying affairs.

Baby Mama, the 2008 comedy that featured Fey as a successful and uptight career woman who hires the brash and obnoxious Poehler to be her surrogate mother, barely coasted on its stars' charms. Sisters, their latest collaboration, is an arguably more enjoyable effort but still contains problems, including gags that are too drawn out, a bloated beginning, a slack middle, and a predictably pat ending. Nevertheless, Sisters works by virtue of Fey and Poehler's chemistry and the energetic playing of the supporting cast, most notably fellow SNL alum Maya Rudolph, who steals every scene by simply breathing.

Sisters reverses the actresses' usual personas. Younger sister Maura (Poehler) has responsibility and earnestness wired into her DNA. A recent divorcee, she is introduced trying to help a homeless man, who turns out not to be very homeless at all. Older sister Kate (Fey), meanwhile, is an unemployed beautician and single mom whose college-age daughter, Haley (Madison Davenport), wishes she would grow up and start acting like a mom for a change. Kate resolves to clean up her act - perhaps moving in with her parents (James Brolin and Dianne Wiest) in Orlando might be a temporary solution to her problems.

There's just one hitch: their parents have gone ahead and sold the family home without giving fair warning to either sister. The sisters are given a couple of days to clean out their childhood keepsakes before the new owners move in. The sisters decide to throw a house party to end all house parties, which would allow the conservative Maura to let her freak flag fly whilst Kate reluctantly agrees to serve as party mom and keep everyone in check. Director Jason Moore (Pitch Perfect) cranks up the chaos - a tree will fall and a swimming pool will be engulfed in a sinkhole by film's end - and the party becomes an outlet for all the characters, who revert back to childish behaviour, reliving the days before children and mortgages tied them down and dampened their ids.

At nearly two hours, Sisters does have many moments of drag, which are exacerbated by bits that are indulgently improvisatory. An exchange between Maura and a Korean manicurist, Hae-Won (the wonderfully deadpan Greta Lee), is sublimely silly until it's not. Ike Barinholtz, as Poehler's love interest, gamely grins and bears it during the film's biggest gross-out gag which, once again, may have wrung more laughs by being more tightly edited.

John Cena is fast positioning himself as an effective straight man for some very funny ladies. "My safe word is 'keep going,'" he tells Fey's Kate and one wishes for more scenes between the two. Still, Sisters is Fey and Poehler's show all the way and they do not disappoint even when the material does. Their send-up of too-tight clubwear might be the highlight and results in the funniest line of the entire film: "We need a little less Forever 21 and a little more Suddenly 42."

Sisters

Directed by: Jason Moore

Written by: Paula Pell

Starring: Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Maya Rudolph, Ike Barinholtz, James Brolin, Dianne Wiest, John Cena, John Leguizamo, Bobby Moynihan, Greta Lee, Madison Davenport, Rachel Dratch, Samantha Bee, Matt Oberg, Kate McKinnon, Jon Glaser, Chris Parnell, Dan Byrd, Emily Tarver, Brian d'Arcy James, Ann Harada, Heather Matarazzo, Adrian Martinez