Dropping dead center among all the Oscar Bait films is a comedy that isn’t exactly playing in that league. I suspect it will not be the talk of the town come Awards Season… but it’s still an amusing little comedy playing in a very familiar sandbox.

The Estate stars Anna Faris and Toni Collette as sisters who decide to make nice with a rich (but hateful) aunt dying of cancer. Unfortunately, other equally unashamed relatives have the same idea.

Yeah, you may have seen “greedy relatives trying to get into the Will” movies before and this is certainly one of them. It’s amusing… I laughed out loud a decent handful of times and chortled and snorted a few more. Probably loses some steam in its second act but eventually picks up for an entirely predictable conclusion.

Some of the humor is definitely in the “wrong” camp. Raunchy and rude in all the right ways. It’s far from the “worst” such comedy though. Certainly everyone in the film is a terrible human being so its a little hard to root for any of ’em. But they are worth laughing at/with.

The cast is pretty good all around. Kathleen Turner plays the dying aunt, David Duchovny is a pervert hoping to win the cash (and get with his cousin), and Rosemarie Dewitt and Ron Livingstone are here with their perverse plans too. Duchovny made me laugh the most, though his creeper routine is not exactly out of his wheelhouse.

Yeah, this is one that’s fairly entertaining… it might make you laugh genuinely, awkwardly, or wickedly but it’ll probably make you laugh an alright number of times. It’s hardly the best comedy and hardly the best comedy in this specific sub-genre, but it’s alright.

Score: 75