Gags about fish balls, rimjobs, Hoobastank – we should expect nothing less from a comedy starring Eric André and John Cena, namely, new Netflix raunchapalooza (or raunchella for you Millennials) Little Brother. Director Matt Spicer (Ingrid Goes West) and scripters Jarrad Paul and Andrew Mogel (Yes Man) tap into the old Farrelly Brothers formula for a story about brothers, and yes, I know what you’re thinking: André and Cena make for unlikely siblings on a number of levels, many of them screamingly obvious. But it makes sense in the Big Brothers/Big Sisters mentoring sense, not that the movie itself makes much sense beyond that. But maybe it’ll do what truly matters, and make us laugh? Maybe, I say. Maybe.

The Gist: Rudd Landy (Cena) is a high-powered real estate agent and family man. Marcus Pinchel (André) is an escapee from a psych ward. Does it get any more oil and water than that? Well, their paths crossed in 1998 when teenage Rudd big-brothered orphan boy Marcus. They played basketball a few times so Rudd could check a box on his college application, and Marcus could go back to the child welfare system. Sad? A little bit. But true, in the sense that this is how real life—and not just life in stupid comedy movies—works. Probably too true.

A lovely family with Deirdre (Michelle Monaghan) and their two sons, a robust career, an inferiority complex with his biological big brother Josh (Christopher Meloni) and 900 million pounds of weights lifted later, Rudd is a happy middle-aged man who’s thrilled at the prospect of becoming the next star of reality show NYC Hustlers. Countless foster homes, a distressing number of horrible mishaps (plane crashes, etc.), admission into a mental health facility and a gross misunderstanding of Rudd’s email later, Marcus crowbars himself into Rudd’s life, upending everything at a critical moment in his career. Granted, Marcus believes all those emails he sent to Rudd were actually answered by Rudd, when they were answered by Rudd’s assistant Mia (Sherry Cola), who we’ll soon learn is totally smitten with Marcus. 

That crush is supposed to be a joke, since Marcus is such a weirdo. But in truth, he’s a sensitive guy who’s been through a lot, has a good heart, and means well. He also has considerable sexual knowledge and prowess and, unlike other agents of chaos in dumbass movies, has no real ulterior motive to glom onto Rudd’s life. Of course, Rudd thinks Marcus is a scammer, since he doesn’t know the email thing happened and the screenplay doesn’t bother to explain it until deep into the third act, but better late than never, I guess? And so we watch Marcus engage in a variety of nutty antics that pucker Rudd’s butt even more than it’s already puckered. Rudd’s relationship with his wife, sons, bio-brother and personal assistant all get wonky. His hope of projecting an alpha version of himself on the reality show goes topsy-turvy. And his poor beloved Porsche takes a lot of abuse. And who’s to blame for all this? Well, it’s more Rudd’s than Marcus’ fault. Imagine that. Irony!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Well, Little Brother slops together the comic proclivities that Cena showed in his Peter Farrelly outing Ricky Stanicky (deeply stupid, but I recommend it for some reason) and the André persona we know from Bad Trip and his sketch-TV vehicle The Eric Andre Show. We also catch a whiff of Step Brothers and Role Models here. 

Performance Worth Watching: It’s hard not to be swayed by Andre’s anything-goes approach to comedy. He’s shameless in a way that bullseyes the sweet spot between Jackass and Chevy Chase.

Sex And Skin: You see butts and side-boob in a wacky threesome scene, an obviously prosthetic wang, and the fairly upsetting implication that Monaghan is going down on Cena’s pooper.

Our Take: Monaghan beelines to the first minty cocktail she can find after that bonkers scene, one of the I’m-ashamed-to-admit-it funnier moments in Little Brother, which is otherwise a middling-to-lousy gross-out yukfest with a soft, squishy, sentimental center. Conceptually, it’s novel that the disruptor character in a Chaos Agent Comedy isn’t a scammer, or in the psych ward not because he’s stereotypically violent, crazy and unpredictable, but because he’s simply been through a lot. Instead of being cowed by a scheme, the Deirdre character is endeared to Marcus because he’s a good person with some goofy eccentricities. The approach is similar to how the Farrelly Brothers handled depictions of people with disabilities in a relatively respectful manner into their un-P.C. comedies in the wild and wooly ’90s (he said, also acknowledging that Shallow Hal probably hasn’t aged particularly well). 

Then again, there’s a “kimchi” joke delivered by Cola that she sure seems to deliver through gritted teeth, since she’s Chinese and asked to participate in an icky all-Asian-people-are-essentially-the-same bit. This is a good example of the inconsistent manner in which the concept is executed. The characters are as haphazard as the plotting, which is just fine if the laughs keep coming. But they don’t. The film is content to follow formula and feed us middling-to-lousy gags, syrupy third-act speeches and phony outtakes over the end credits. Perhaps we can dig deeper and turn up a narrative about how—compared to people who’ve experienced significant hardship—successful, privileged people think they can forgo therapy and fill the hole with material things. But in reality, the reason the fancy Porsche is in the movie is so it can repeatedly get trashed. 

Our Call: I like Cena and Andre, and pairing them here should’ve been a slam-dunk. But it ultimately comes down to this: Too much flop sweat, not enough laughs. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.