Sis­ters

Sisters strad­dles two gen­res: par­ty film and com­e­dy. It’s teenage may­hem hymn Project X sketched by the arch humour of Sat­ur­day Night Live or Judd Apatow’s midlife-cri­sis movie, This Is 40, pow­ered by hedo­nis­tic regres­sion. But filmic equa­tions only pro­vide the foun­da­tions of the picture.

Its most colour­ful trap­pings are its two stars: long time com­e­dy col­lab­o­ra­tors, friends, awards co-hosts and book bud­dies, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. The first ladies of US sketch com­e­dy have estab­lished a fine­ly-cal­i­brat­ed chem­istry that caus­es quib­bles with the archi­tec­tur­al strength of Sis­ters to shrink in sig­nif­i­cance. Audi­ences that want to watch Poehler and Fey being fun­ny togeth­er for two hours will not be dis­ap­point­ed. Being fun­ny togeth­er is their brand and they deliv­er like slick A‑game professionals.

Com­ic range pow­ers Poehler/​Fey/​Sisters, which tick­les noth­ing so spe­cif­ic as a fun­ny bone but a wide selec­tion of ribs like a long-armed musi­cian play­ing the xylo­phone. There are one-lin­ers about age, sex­u­al­i­ty, clothes, char­ac­ter, drugs, sex, friends, ene­mies and fam­i­ly. There are phys­i­cal set pieces span­ning slap­stick (putting a dress on back­wards) dra­ma (a swim­ming pool cav­ing into a sink hole), and the dra­mat­i­cal­ly slap­stick (peo­ple plum­met­ing through ceilings).

Destruc­tion is the over­rid­ing theme: the destruc­tion of a house and the destruc­tion of old child­ish iden­ti­ties. The sto­ry is about two sis­ters who learn that their par­ents (Dianne Wiest and James Brolin) are sell­ing their child­hood home and accord­ing­ly decide to have one last par­ty in which they switch roles. The sen­si­ble Mau­ra (Amy Poehler) will be drink­ing to excess and try­ing to have sex with buff younger neigh­bour (Ike Bar­in­holtz), while wild woman Kate (Tina Fey) will be abstain­ing from liquor so as to act as par­ty mum.

Pitch Per­fect direc­tor Jason Moore shoots SNL writer Paula Pell’s script. Theirs is a world in which tidy­ing up an old bed­room involves a mon­tage of hijinks and still, mirac­u­lous­ly, the room ends up neater. Mak­ing pot brown­ies involves say­ing, ​“I’m going to make brown­ies.” Cut to Tina Fey pass­ing round a tray of brown­ies. Cut­ting out the slow-paced graft of exis­tence, like an anti-Chan­tal Aker­man, clears the stage for Poehler and Fey to dance their pre­cise­ly-stepped dance through a chaos of their own making.

The wrestler, John Cena, who flexed his lit­er­al and comedic mus­cles along­side Amy Schumer in Train­wreck, reap­pears to do the same for anoth­er lucra­tive Amy. He is amongst the fun­ni­est of the ensem­ble sup­port cast mem­bers, giv­ing a dead­pan per­for­mance as a drug deal­er and object of Kate’s lust. When she asks, ​‘Do you have chil­dren’ and he responds, ​‘I’m sure I do’, his com­plete lack of into­na­tion is what makes the line hilarious.

Maya Rudolph pitch­es the vil­lain of the piece, Brin­da, between arch bitch and des­per­ate par­ty crash­er. The stand-offs between her and Fey are a les­son in how to stage a wit­ty cat fight. Ike Bar­in­holtz is most­ly sad­dled with the straight guy part, but all this changes in the wake of a painful inci­dent with a fig­urine. The best line in the film – a sto­ical descrip­tion – is his. Not all per­for­mances are a hit. Bob­by Moyni­han is so shrill that when his char­ac­ter takes drugs and becomes still shriller, you’re pray­ing that some­one has a tran­quil­lis­er gun.

The film heads towards won­der­ful wild destruc­tion but as with the room sequence, car­nage is right­ed with ridicu­lous ease. Con­se­quences lack weight in Sis­ters mak­ing it fun but for­get­table. Per­haps this is too stern a judge­ment to pass on suc­cess­ful enter­tain­ment. Cloud 9 is one of the drugs brought to the par­ty. The brief bril­liant highs it offers the user is equiv­a­lent to this light comedy.