You could keep asking “Why?” to the movie’s co-writer Jonah Hill (he has story credit) and producer Ben Stiller, both of whom have put their names on much better studio comedies than this one. A better movie might have given Ned enough flaws to balance the equation, but all we see here is that he’s a bit of a stick-in-the-mud, and, because he runs a printing company, is also pretty tech-averse. Hated it.” 
 
 Granted, “Why Him?” director John Hamburg isn’t Steven Spielberg or Rob Reiner, but he’s written some big hits (“Meet the Parents,” “Zoolander”) and he knows comedy. Ned has done everything right: His employees love him, his peers respect him, he’s paying for his daughter’s Stanford education. Bryan Cranston’s Ned Fleming is skulking about the home office of James Franco’s Laird Mayhew, an obnoxious Silicon Valley multi-millionaire romancing his precious daughter Stephanie (Zoey Deutch), who has dropped out of Stanford in order to live with this lout. He butts heads with James Franco's West Coast, heavily tattooed, young-millionaire video-game developer dingbat, Laird Mayhew, who wants to marry Ned's sweetheart daughter, Steph (Zoey Deutch). How many movies and sitcoms have we seen about the father who thinks his daughter’s boyfriend/husband/fiancé/whatever isn’t good enough for her? He has a smarthouse A.I. Think of Lucasfilm’s production of “Howard the Duck.” Spielberg’s “1941.” Beatty and Hoffman and Elaine May with “Ishtar.” Michael “The Deer Hunter” Cimino and “Heaven’s Gate.” Rob Reiner, director of “A Few Good Men” and “The Princess Bride” and “Misery,” giving us “North,” which inspired Roger’s immortal passage: “I hated this movie. Laird's manservant Gustav is the film's resident Scene Thief, played by Keegan-Michael Key, endearingly ridiculous as ever. The images that ensue might haunt you for all your days: a dead moose suspended in a pool of its own urine; a child motorboating his own father; a crude animation of a man being anally raped by a three-headed dragon with a rocket for a penis.
– "Maybe just see Rogue One again" seems to be the consensus from those who sat through holiday comedy Why Him?, which opens Friday. The Bryan Cranston and James Franco vehicle from a co-writer of Meet the Parents is currently 40% rotten on Rotten Tomatoes. Here's what critics are saying: Why Him? fails in part because it lacks Meet the Parents' patience with building comedic tension, according to Darren Franich at Entertainment Weekly. "The film wants to be a comedy of excess, but it just feels excessive ... You want toilet jokes? You got them. Dozens!" One of a handful of relatively few positive reviews, Bruce DeMara of the Toronto Star found Why Him? to be a "wildly entertaining jaunt" as long as you're "looking for light seasonal fare" packed to the gills with "ribald, gross-out humor." Richard Roeper at the Chicago Sun Times disagrees, to put it mildly, saying Why Him? is "in the bottom 1% of movies I've ever seen." It's "not funny, not funny, not funny, not funny, not funny" despite starring "two of the most gifted and versatile actors on the planet." And those actors have something to answer for. At the New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis says the film proves "definitively that slapping Mr. Franco's scenery-eating grin on any old drivel doesn't guarantee entertainment," especially when the script is "shoveling expletives into the holes where jokes ought to be." Meanwhile, Andrew Lapin at Vulture finds the film's title could rightly be asked of Cranston. "The actor, who once brilliantly crafted the slow-burning tragedy of Walter White, is forced to mug helplessly through scenes where he's sprayed in the face with toilet water. Why him?" Ending on a more positive note, John Serba at M Live recommends Why Him? "with reservations" and with an asterisk, saying he's also "reserving the right to feel, someday, probably sooner rather than later, embarrassed for laughing at it as much as I did."