The Guilt Trip: Review

Release date: 8 March 2013
Certificate: 12A
Director: Anne Fletcher
Starring: Seth Rogen, Barbra Streisand, Brett Cullen

What’s the story?
Budding inventor Andy (Rogen) quickly comes to regret inviting his widowed mother Joyce (Streisand) to accompany him on a Trans-American sales trip. Yet could this be the ultimate bonding experience?

What did we think?
Driving Ms Crazy would be an appropriate name for an annoying comedy that wastes no time wearing out its welcome. It says much about Hollywood that the only roles it can push in Streisand’s direction are clingy, smothering moms from hell. The greater mystery, though, is why Hollywood thinks they’ll work time after time.

Did you stay up to watch the Oscars this year? If so you’d have seen Barbra Streisand pay elegant tribute to the late Marvin Hamlisch with a moving and classy rendition of 1973 standard The Way We Were. It was a welcome reminder of what Babs – looking damn fine, by the way, for a woman who turns 71 this year – does better than virtually anyone else. All of which makes her latest screen outing all the more strange and baffling.

There are no doubt a great many Hollywood actresses of a certain age who would leap at the opportunity to be the bothersome mother of one of the hippest stars du jour. Somehow, though, neither the role nor the co-star – Seth Rogen of Superbad and Knocked Up fame – appear worthy of an icon of Streisand’s lustre, something quickly borne out by a film that shows little clue how to use it to its advantage.

Rogen’s muted, disengaged performance does nothing to hide the flaws in the movie. And you do have to wonder what he saw in his own part – other than a character who spends the entire film being mean, petulant and ungrateful.

Verdict: Not funny, girl.
 

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