Aaah Crocs. So he IS an idiot.
To call Ned (Paul Rudd) an idiot is patently unfair, gormless, naive and altogether too trusting yes, but not an idiot. On the plus side Ned is open and unguarded, choosing always to see only the good qualities in people and giving the benefit of the doubt even when it is likely not the best option.
Ned is the kind of guy that would show up at your door way too early in the morning collecting for charity, only his sweet nature and genuine nature would not only break down your resistance but somehow cause you to give $20 more than you planned.
Ned likes everyone including his spiteful hippy ex-girlfriend and her new beau, even his parole officer. Ned loves his three sisters and their respective partners and children, but Ned LOVES his dog Willie Nelson, and upon his release from prison for a minor offense (how come he gets 8 months for a $20 pot deal when Lindsay Lohan gets a few hours on her 3rd or 4th offense?) he decides that he needs to scrape together a thousand bucks to pay his way back into his former home on the farm to be near him.
This sets up a chain of events as Ned is shuffled from one family to the next as he inevitably blabs information and upsets those providing him with shelter. These secrets range from minor character foibles up to marital infidelities, career opportunism and lesbian pregnancies. Ned never means to hurt anyone, but his disarming nature and interest in others allows them to tell him everything, but it is also these same qualities that occasionally blind Ned to the fact that he perhaps shouldn’t be passing the inner thoughts and feelings to random people, regardless of how interesting it might be.
I might digress here to say that Ned is essentially a nice guy and practically every non-family member he meets thinks just that – his only crime involves recreational drugs, to which I say entrapment!
What the movie chooses to ignore is that there are many characters in this film and kids aside they are all deeply flawed human beings at some level or another, disloyal, selfish, alcoholic and often just plain mean, yet it is somehow Ned who is labelled the ‘idiot’ repeatedly. In fact only Ned, another relentlessly cheerful hippy dude and a lesbian partner seem decent people. I’m not sure why this angers me so but I simply cannot like a lightweight comedy with precious few laughs and a cast of arseholes, backstabbers and vindictive shits.
At one point near the end of the film Ned very nearly breaks his visage of eternal pessimism to remind his sisters that A/ maybe if they don’t want their dirty secrets made public they should think twice before telling the guy who tells everyone things and B/ maybe if they were better human beings they wouldn’t have so many fucking dirty secrets in the first place?
But he doesn’t.
And that’s a shame, cos even fictional movie characters need to be told that how reprehensible they are sometimes.
Final Rating – 5.5 / 10. Like Ned Our Idiot Brother is harmless, pretty lazy and quite often misses the point, unlike Ned it is often unlikeable and dull. I mean here is a film that screamed for a Willie Nelson cameo so loudly that I guaranteed to my wife a Willie sighting within minutes. (Wait, that didn’t sound right.) I mean if it was a Rob Schneider film Willie would’ve shown early and often!
On second thought, if that’s my alternative perhaps boring is better. But it’s still boring.
