I’m all for improvisation, but the cast of The House seems to have been given a fairly funny high concept―in order to pay for their daughter’s college tuition, a couple teams up with a neighbor to run an illegal casino out of his suburban home―and told to run with it, sans any sort of script at all. And as is often the case when improvisation runs out of steam, most scenes spiral into f-bombs and exaggerated violence. Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler have some fun riffing off each other, while Jason Mantzoukas gets a few laughs as their self-destructive, reluctantly divorced friend. This could have been a sharp satire about the chaos that ensues when the burdens of adulthood meet the banality of suburbia, but not enough of the jokes are aimed in that direction.
