gavin6942 A young couple has a chance to move into a gorgeous duplex in the perfect New York neighborhood. All they have to do is bump off the current tenant, a cute little old lady.I feel like there was potential here but it never quite reached the full level. The concept is perfect for a dark comedy, and Danny DeVito is the right guy to bring such a script to fruition. But the lead actors were just not right. Ben Stiller has a few good comedies, but mostly duds. He was not able to bring his A-game. And Drew Barrymore was just bad through and through.There is one aspect about the film I liked: the suggestion that the old woman was immortal or possibly the devil herself. These ideas are only hinted out, but I thought it was quite clever to drop those hints in there...

SnoopyStyle Alex Rose (Ben Stiller) and Nancy Kendricks (Drew Barrymore) are looking for a place. They find a nice duplex in Brooklyn for a very reasonable price except Mrs. Connelly (Eileen Essell) is the rent control tenant upstairs. Kenneth (Harvey Fierstein) is the real estate agent. Officer Dan (Robert Wisdom) comes in to investigate when the couple keeps getting in trouble over the little old lady.Director Danny DeVito is pushing hard for this slapstick dark comedy. I find little of it funny. I really don't like this couple and I like the little old lady even less. The old lady is too fake and really annoying. It's a lot of fake niceties and passive aggressiveness. I don't like passive aggressive characters sometimes and I really dislike this one. As annoying as it is for the couple, it is more annoying to watch them being annoyed. The more annoying the annoying old lady gets annoying the annoying couple, the more annoyed I got about the annoying antics. I did like the reveal or maybe I like that it was over.

breakdownthatfilm-blogspot-com Ben Stiller is one of Hollywood's most talented comedic actors and has proved in other films that he has the ability to make some really great and funny films. But I am extremely confused to how this idea for a story ever sounded hilarious. Never have I witnessed such mean spiritedness to such likable characters, and to make matters worse have those likable characters stoop to a level that is degrading enough that it crosses the line between what is funny and what borders on the edge of lunacy. And to top it off, Danny DeVito directed it; this comedy should've worked.The story is about a young happy couple (Ben Stiller & Drew Barrymore) who decide to buy a bottom floor to a duplex. While on the top floor is an elderly woman who seems fine enough to live with. Hah! It's a shame to see this movie come to full circle, it's so sad to the point where you regret knowing how things will turn out in the future. Just why? How is it funny? What were they thinking? The only credit I'll give to this movie is for the actors attempting to make the movie funny. That's it. The main actors try and so do some other less important actors but it feels so difficult to accept how low brow the comedy became.The problem is once the couple has moved in, the old woman on the top floor is everything nobody wanted in their life,...EVER. She consistently asks for help on impossible tasks, forgetting names, playing the television during all hours of the night. You know, something every old person does? It's understandable that stereotypes can be funny but it doesn't work here. All this will do is annoy viewers and feel just as restless as the couple on screen dealing with the same senselessness. And it doesn't get any better. In fact, the comedic elements become so derivative, that at a point in the movie it qualifies the subject of MURDER as an OK thing to do. What? Even Ben Stiller's directed film, The Cable Guy (1996) didn't drop to those immoral levels.And with all the time and money spent on trying to rid the duplex of this old woman, the couple could've moved out a long time ago and found a much more suitable place to live. Instead, things become so out of control that it would make the viewer question, "Who in the world would want to live here now?". It's baffling. Also, even though the actors play their characters the best they can, the logic and reasoning behind some of the situations are absolutely absurd - especially if one person is making an accusation against two people and they both witnessed what happened and the situation being described is nothing like the one they took part in. Who is this thickheaded to be convinced of it? How is it believable? How? How? How? Other than this, the production is fine and David Newman's score is OK although it's just another unreleased set of music. It tries but fails badly.What seems to be a decent comedy turns out to be an extremely incompetent mean spirited story. It also could send out the wrong message about senior citizens.

DICK STEEL The home gatecrasher, the unwelcome guest, and the tenant from hell. These can be used to sum up the story of Duplex, directed by comedian/actor Danny DeVito and featuring the first time pairing of comedians Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore as the husband and wife suburban couple who through an animated opening credit sequence, go through property after property looking for the perfect place to set up their home, which should also double up as a home office for Stiller's Alex Rose, an up and coming writer due to complete his next novel without having to write at Starbucks.Thanks to their housing agent, they settle for the titular duplex, which seemed like a great idea for their housing plans and one that's within their budget, a good deal even though it comes with a caveat that they cannot throw out the existing tenant, an old lady called Mrs Connelly (Eileen Essell) who stays upstairs and well, pays the rent. But little do they know that their lives would soon turn topsy turvy through the skillful manipulation that senior citizens can be capable of, appealing to good citizenry in wanting to help others, only to be willingly exploited to run errants, and face a crisis of sorts in either wanting to stay put, or leave.So we go into full gear of the battle between households, where sleep gets interrupted through the elderly lady putting on her TV at full blast, and the couple getting back in tit- for-tat fashion. But it seems that Mrs Connelly is always one step ahead either in the luck department, or having the authorities, Officer Dan (Robert Wisdom) on her side. After all, who would you rather believe - a frail old woman in her twilight years, or a young yuppie couple whose backfiring revenge tactics put them in bad light as discourteous, intolerant people? Oh if only everyone else knew the cunningness of the elderly!Danny DeVito's film, based on a story by Larry Doyle, however keeps things rather firmly in PG fashion even though the couple's intent move from nice tactics into murderous territory, deciding to employ desperate measures given that they're driven up the wall and with the couple both having their household revenue stream impacted. Both Stiller and Barrymore provide good comic timing especially in their individual scenes (well, someone has to bring home the bacon) when their characters get stuck with "entertaining" the bothersome old lady whose benign requests usually turn out to the contrary.But the scene stealer would of course be Eileen Essell as Mrs Connelly with her playing both the fragile old Irish lady who is more than meets the eye, a force to be reckoned with beneath the aged exterior, capable of tugging at your conscience and making you feel guilty should you not accede to her gentle pleas, which almost always come laced with sarcasm, or the nitty gritty that makes you feel bad. Convincingly playing her role without which this film would probably have not been able to make us laugh with or at Stiller and Barrymore's characters as they get stuck in their predicament which comes with a predictable twist at the end. It's evil, I know.