Craig Johnson
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It’s immediately obvious that she is cut from the same cloth as her old man, and the young actress brings something out in Harrelson in the same way that Hailee Steinfeld did in last year’s The Edge of Seventeen.
With his performances in The Edge of Seventeen and Wilson, Woody Harrelson reminds us of his gifts not only for comedy, but for finding the inner childlike innocent in even the prickliest of characters.
He does more with his supporting turn in last year’s The Edge of Seventeen than he does with the entirety of Wilson, and that’s because Wilson feels far more contrived.
Harrelson is most functional as an outsize supporting player; witness him hitting home runs as a cynical high school teacher in "The Edge of Seventeen," coloring alongside Matthew McConaughey's crazy in "True Detective" or going gregarious as a Twinkie-obsessed apocalypse survivor in "Zombieland."
But if anyone can make such a character not just amusingly tolerable but even somewhat sympathetic, Woody Harrelson —who rarely gets his proper due for his vital contributions to movies ranging from the "Hunger Games” franchise to last year’s “ The Edge of Seventeen ”—would be a good choice.
Instead, he’s forced to play a man who, quite frankly, isn’t particularly interesting – certainly not as a leading character in a motion picture – and the overriding feeling is that the filmmakers should have just made a movie about Tom Hanks’ Cast Away volleyball.
Woody Harrelson does what he can with the lead role in Wilson, but as movie characters go, his Wilson finishes a distant runner up to the volleyball in Cast Away.
In this year's latest example of dredging up old material rather than create something new, the brain trust of Hollywood has decided to give Tom Hanks' co-star in "Cast Away" his own sequel with "Wilson."
It’s not the biopic about the volleyball sidekick from Cast Away that we’ve all wanted, but Wilson still is full of hot air.
Just in case you are wondering, “Wilson” is not a sequel to “ Cast Away .”
Hader goes full Stefon just twice: in blond-wig drag at a Halloween parade and when trying to cheer Maggie up with a duo lip-synching to Jefferson Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.” (Karaokeing to an old pop hit is a corny film trope, but it worked for Jon Cryer in Pretty in Pink and Mike Myers in Wayne’s World, and it’s effective here as well.)
In fact, the similarities to Sheridan’s Sicario script are striking to the point of repetition – and troubling in the matter of his female lead, who is again a naive and mildly incompetent federal agent in over her head.
But despite a climax that is so touchy-feely it defies reason — if "The Skeleton Twins" redeemed Starship's "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" from the depths of the cheese shlock abyss, "Instant Family" sinks it right back to the bottom — "Instant Family's" heart is in the right place.