Room for Rent

It's hardly groundbreaking but a nice little comedy with some good performances and a reasonable few laughs. Passes the time well enough without blowing your mind.

Teenager Mitch (Mark Little) Baldwin wins the $3.5 million lotto. Years later, the money is all gone from his crazy ideas and he's living with his parents (Mark McKinney, Stephanie Weir). He's a jobless slacker doing nothing with his life. His father has been forced to retire early and they have to sell the house. Mitch has the idea to clear out the spare room to rent. Carl Lemay (Brett Gelman) is the renter with a secret agenda. Lindsay Ross (Carla Gallo) is Mitch's ex-girlfriend.

This is a comedic idea looking for a way to make it funny. It all centers on Mitch. He's not actually funny. He needs to be the foil to Brett Gelman's wacky creep. Brett does that so well. Carla Gallo almost fixes it by humanizing Mitch. He just needs to be less of an annoying jerk. What this needs is a few flashbacks early in the movie where all his friends are taking advantage of him. He needs to build up some sympathies. He does it over time, but it takes too long. The audience needs to like Mitch more for this to be truly fun.

As slacker redemption movies go, this is better than many. This slacker is 30-something; he squandered a $3 million lottery prize, and lives with his parents. They take in a not-quite-right boarder. You wonder, half-way through, just how dark it will go.

Most characters are played in such a realistically low-key way that the "threat" character needn't go over-the-top to seem menacing. The plot moves smoothly. A couple of red herrings make the final plot twist satisfying. It's not "War and Peace", but it's believable and enjoyable light entertainment, a notch above the usual slapstick archetype of this genre.

They tried but sadly missed the mark badly. Not funny!

I put this movie on intending to pause it and go and make some dinner after about twenty minutes, but I enjoyed it so much I didn't get my dinner and watched it the whole way through. Hilarious with a hint of sinister.