The hook of The Skeleton Twins is to see SNL funny folks Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig in serious roles, but while they do well in their performances, they are undercut by a thin script without full confidence in its story.
Hader is Milo, a gay man in LA who, after a breakup, attempts suicide by cutting his wrists. Wiig is Maggie, who lives across the country and was contemplating taking a handful of pills when the call comes in about Milo. She decides to go get her bro and bring him back home to stay with her and her husband, Luke Wilson in the role Bill Pullman used to play in the Nineties as the decent guy who gets crapped on by an ungrateful significant other.
Rapidly the twins get into bad situations due to their depressed natures. Milo tries to reconnect with a former high school teacher (Ty Burrell) whom he had a relationship with when he was 15. Maggie starts shagging her hunky scuba instructor. There's a visit from their terrible New Agey mother and lots of catching up on the past decade they've spent apart.
While the performances are good - Hader is more a surprise than Wiig, who's done good film work before - the story is annoying because self-defeating people are bad enough when we understand their motivations, but when they just seem to be making bad choices for the purpose of the story, bah. But the worst is when it seems like they realized people really want to see madcap antics from the funny people so they have a painfully contrived scene where they lipsync Starship's kitschy "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now." Weak.
Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.
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