‘The Layover’ Is Brainless and Insipid, With Characters to Match

Clueless and insipid, a paralyzing bore called The Layover is more girls-behaving-badly dreck about foxy, broke and recently unemployed bimbos trying to get laid. Maxing  out their credit cards and cashing in their frequent flyer miles, roommates Kate (Alexandra Daddario) and Meg (Kate Upton) head for Fort Lauderdale looking for action, when a Category 4 hurricane detours their plane to St. Louis. Kate, the brain-dead brunette, was a school teacher; Meg, the brain-dead bottle blonde, sold skin products. They are supposed to be smart, but the evidence was obviously left at home with their dignities. On the plane they find themselves seated on both sides of a peroxide-blonde firefighter named Ryan (Matt Barr) and it’s lust at first sight. In the rest of this deadly fiasco the girls declare war to see who gets Ryan into bed. If this is the kind of garbage kids are watching and absorbing with glee today, no wonder the country is in such a mess.

Unfortunately, there isn’t one genuine moment of originality or honest humor in The Layover to warrant so much as a ten-dollar budget, and the screenplay, by Lance Krall and David Hornsby, two television sitcom writers from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” is so stale it reeks like old mackerel.  Sometime around the point the movie turns into a commercial for Sheraton Hotels, the girls find themselves at the same lodgings as the fireman, who is on his way to a wedding. The fact that he’s as big of a hunk as Mr. Peepers, and badly in need of a haircut, doesn’t faze the two female bimbos, who both reveal their promiscuous natures. Their laborious attempts to bed this amoral doofus include disco dancing in which a boob falls out, riding in a hot air balloon with a one-eyed pilot, and enough booze and drugs to kill off the Russian air force. Their mutual humiliations lead from one contrivance to another until eventually, they go viral and violent, beating each other up like a Cuisinart full of lip gloss. A lot of broken capillaries for nothing, if you ask me, since the object of their drooling turns out to have a Johnson as crooked as a bent clothes hanger. (They compare notes in an exchange of dialogue I  could do without.) Opting for another way to get to Florida in a storm, the girls join the fireman and a horny jewelry salesman on a 17-hour car trip in which the former friends think up endless ways to insult and torture each other. There’s a scene in a filthy gas-station toilet that breaks all records in disgusting bad taste. Everyone turns on Kate when she emerges, covered with excrement. Too late. I had turned on the entire movie an hour before she ran out of toilet paper.

In the tradition of such trash as Bad Moms, this catatonic horror is aimed at the overcrowded market of brainless meatheads who watch every movie while texting on their iPhones and chewing gum. Alas, The Layover is even worse than most. Compared to this idiocy, Bridesmaids looks like Citizen Kane. It’s not witty or clever. It has no plot. The characters are all so hateful and obnoxious that you don’t care if they mature or not, and you don’t believe it when they do. The acting wouldn’t survive the first six weeks in a beginner’s acting class. The worst thing about The Layover—and the  biggest shock of all—is the revelation that it was lamely, incompetently, and amateurish directed by actor William H. Macy, who should be forced at gunpoint to  surrender his union card. Some people will do anything for money.