I ended up seeing Jay and Mark Duplass’ new movie, Jeff Who Lives at Home, by accident. I don’t mean that I walked into the wrong theater and someone immediately tied me down, forcing me to watch the movie that just started. Nope, instead what happened was, like an idiot, I went to go see The Hunger Games a week after it opened and, as any movie-goer could have told me, it was sold out on a Saturday night. So with this being the predicament I was faced with last Saturday, I did what most people do when facing a similar situation: I picked a different movie. Gasp! (Don’t worry, I ended up seeing The Hunger Games the next night, tickets purchased in advance.)

Anyway, so that’s how I ended up seeing Jeff Who Lives at Home, written and directed by the same guy–Jay Duplass (along with his brother)– behind similar-tempermant Cyrus. For those of you who missed the quite minimal advertising of this movie, Jeff Who Lives at Home stars a very credible cast made up of Susan Sarandon, Jason Segal, Ed Helms and Judy Greer, and focuses on a pair of brothers (Segal and Helms) as they try to figure our their meanings in life throughout the course of a day.

It seems like quite an ambitious task– discovering the meaning of life in one day, right? Well, after seeing the movie it turns out that it was indeed a little too ambitious.

The movie seemed to move very quickly– its running time clocking in at a mere 83 minutes– and it just ended up moving too fast to really uncover anything of real substance. Moreover, I’m not sure Jeff Who Lives at Home ever escaped from the trailer. Rather, I felt like I had seen everything in the movie already, from beginning to end, because I had seen the trailer. I’m not sure this is the fault of the movie, instead, more exact blame can be given to its marketing team, but even so it is a huge movie oh-no-no to reveal that much in the trailer.

At the end of the day, the movie was cute (how could it not be with that cast?!) and it was entertaining, but it definitely did not achieve what it set out to do. If one thing remained a constant, however, it was the reaffirmation Jeff Who Lives at Home provided, confirming that, just as expected, Susan Sarandon would make the coolest mom ever.

RENT IT.