It is a performances centric movie

The first must-see film of the year.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Now I have to admit that this is a lousy movie with a lousy concept. I am typing as I watch this. The awful thing is I am finding it reasonably funny. Now not Blazing Saddles funny but amusing in a really dumb sort of way. Danny De Vito has made so much better films than this and he is the best thing in it, even though he does not appear much. The guys who play the sons in this(I cannot even be bothered to find out who they are) do an OK job but only OK not great. The guys who play their friends cannot seriously be contemplating a film career based on this outing. The writing is poor and the direction is so-so. As I state in my summary it is a guilty pleasure watching this and I feel like it is sucking the intelligence out of me. But I cannot stop watching it. Sue me or Kill me now!!

These two spoiled and jobless Southern Cal dudes (Hansen and Stone), each brother about twenty-five or so, are left home alone while their parents (DeVito and Sagal) take a vacation from them. They're mentally blank to the point at which they don't know that you must pay an electric bill or the power goes off, see? So they visit a supermarket where a girl friend of theirs (Crosby) works. The manager happens at the moment to be finishing the arrangement of a large plate of sampler cheese cubes with toothpicks stuck in them. The manager is what they would call a real douche bag. He insults everyone freely, calls Crosby "tits" and "C cup." He fires Crosby in front of the two dudes, saying, "She stepped outside her box, and by 'box' I mean vagina, get it?" So the taller of the two dudes yanks down his phat pants, hops up on the table, plops his bare rear end onto the platter of cheese, wriggles his behind down into them for what seems like several geological epochs, and says something like, "How do you like THOSE cheese cubes?" The other dude picks up a cheese cube, pops it into his mouth, and comments on their savory quality.Now, if you think this is funny, this is your movie.The whole movie is like that. It does its best to be outrageous -- and I guess it IS that -- in an attempt to imitate the Farrelly brothers' successful earlier efforts by coupling it with the cash-generating "Home Alone," but it does so with witless abandon. The S word is used freely. So is the D word and the F bomb and the B word. ("B" as in, "blue B***s," which Danny DeVito, a man over fifty, claims to be suffering from.) The writers manage to avoid the Q word and the X word and the Z word but only because there aren't any that are dirty, unless you count "quoit", which I'm tempted but unwilling to do.What? You say that's not funny enough? Okay. How about this. One of the brothers is sleeping and the other sneaks up and begins to rub a plastic phallus around his face. The sleeping dude yawns and the dude who is awake inserts the phallus between his teeth. The sleeper wakes up, the other dude hides the phallus behind his back, and -- the payoff? "Did you just put something in my mouth?" "No." That's the joke, the whole joke, and nothing but the joke -- the joke being that there really is no joke. The scene has no point, no capsheaf. The minute or so in which we see plastic on nose is itself supposed to keep you laughing. The writers haven't bothered to build the scene to any sort of peak or climax. They don't think you care. They think your sensitivity is that of a bowling ball, rather like the two airheads who star in this offal.If it does, if you even smile at this description of the incident, this is the movie for you.

Sam Harper's 'House Broken' is pointless venture, with nothing working on it's advantage. In order to enjoy his retirement, a father takes drastic measures to get his twenty something, slacker sons to move out and fend for themselves. Now does the idea excite you? It doesn't work for me, sorry! The direction is bland, the camera-work is a mess. The acting is not great either, Danny DeVito is wasted, why did to something like this? Katey Sagal is bland. Ryan Hansen hams to the hilt. Skyler Stone is okay. Thomas F. Wilson has never been so unconvincing.Skip this film, Thumbs Down!

After you've watched this movie, you can call it both ways, especially after Danny Devito's 2 sons, Ryan Hansen as Elliot, and Skyler Stone as Quinn, are done. Talk about what have to be the most nerdy, brainless, half-witted, clueless and screw-balled airheads - these 2 and their pack of equally dumb friends. Their girlfriends weren't much better either.It was a pleasure, though, to see Danny DeVito once again. After all these years, he proves that he hasn't lost his touch, ever so excellent. That expression he has when arching his brow and puckering his lips, signaling he's about to drum up something, cracks me up still just as it did way back when he made Twins with Arnold Schwarzenegger. In this movie, boy does he have a handful with his dysfunctional misfits, an airhead of a wife not willing to live without "her boys", a wacky neighbor in the persona of Tom Wilson (yes, the very same "Biff" from Back to the Future), and a firefighter friend he hires with a pet snake to scare off the Brady bunch (John Farley as "Nate").But our hero, now ex-Fire Chief and Firefighter Captain, has no intention of spending his retirement accompanied by screwballs, be they his sons or not. Oh no! he has a whole plan drawn up to teach these guys to be men, and move on. Does he succeed? Well, you'll have to find out.What I take exception to is the constant and varied sexual innuendos, not played down either - but really crass and crude. There were several moments where public references to both male and female genitalia were made; I do not see what this had to do with the plot, or how it contributed to the story, other than cheapening it unnecessarily. Lots of dildos illustrating their function - at one time, the elder plays at putting one in his brother's mouth while sleeping. There was a scene with a dummy which I thought sick and unnecessary, and the list goes on.This, primarily, is what prompted my low score. It isn't a flick you'll want to watch with your family, especially not young kids. So if you watch this, make sure whomever is with you (if anyone) is mature enough and will not take undue offense at such portrayal of what nowadays is called 'humor'.That being said, a few laughs and giggles are on the menu, tainted, sadly, with a lot of mindless humor and crude language/behavior.