In the last week I've seen two of the higher-profile Studio comedies of the Summer season. Both were disappointing, one much more than the other.
Dinner for Schmucks
Jay Roach
Loosely adapted from a funny French farce and boasting an all-star comedic cast,
Dinner for Schmucks is incredibly and mysteriously quite dull. Simple plot: Rudd plays a mid-level executive who must partake in a cruel game if he wants to advance at the company. Once a month, the senior execs have a dinner at the boss' stately home, the clandestine purpose being for each to invite the biggest misfit or freak they can find. The player who brings the most laughable moron is the "winner" and curries favor with the boss. Rudd's character is reluctant to play, but literally bumps into the perfect pawn in Steve Carell's socially awkward and unintentionally destructive loser.
Other than being annoying with a mushy center, the talented Carell never finds any kind of character to really play, bouncing all over the place, often in the same scene. Rudd is his usual likable on-screen self, but despite the odd goings on never really gets anything to sink his chops into either. There is a fantastic supporting cast including Kristen Schaal, Ron Livingston, Larry Wilmore and the now seemingly ever-present Zach Galifianakis. Zach gets to have some fun and wrings some laughs out of the tired and clunky script, but the real shining star is Flight of the Conchorder Jemaine Clement, who's vain and flighty artist is like something out of a different film but he's so committed to it that he brings much-needed life everytime he's on screen. Otherwise there are very, very few laughs, and mild ones at that, which given the cast you'd expect some honest guffaws if only by accidental osmosis. But the story and direction manage to keep them all down. It also takes WAY too long to get to the dinner, and frankly if that part had been masterful and hilarious I could almost forgive the mostly humorless first hour or so. But the title feast of freaks is just as much of a let-down as the rest, a slow, plodding build to a routine and anti-climactic would-be setpiece. The clichéd yet tacked-on sentimentality of the finale makes it all somehow worse.
I was
so ready to have a good, fun, dumb time at the movies and forgive it a lot. Instead
Dinner for Schmucks was more like punishment, just sitting there in the dark in disbelief, not laughing hardly at all and wondering how it could have gone this horribly wrong.
GRADE: D
The Other Guys
Adam McKay
This one isn't as much of a laughless misfire as
Schmucks, but that's a very low bar to clear, and
The Other Guys is still damn far from being as funny as it should be, either. Ferrell and his longtime buddy and collaborator McKay team up for a fourth time in feature film form (following
Anchorman, Talladega Nights and
Step Brothers), and while there are definitely some laughs along the way it isn't anywhere near as successful as their other projects. Seemed like almost can't-miss material, a spoof of the Buddy Cop genre pairing banished burnout Mark Wahlberg with wimpy desk jockey Ferrell. But other than their natural timing and personality, the script curiously gives them little to work against. It either should have committed to the idea of a wild, silly, over-the-top spoof (as in
The Naked Gun) or placed these characters into a relatively straight genre piece and watched them play against the conventions (as in
Hot Fuzz). Instead you get a little of both and enough of neither. Another great supporting cast including Michael Keaton, Rob Riggle, Steve Coogan, Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson, and while all get a few laughs (especially Keaton, who it's great to see with a nice supporting part again) it never, ever clicks over into that next level and beyond. Not unwatchable, certainly, but going back to look at the demented and inspired brilliance of
Anchorman and
Step Brothers, this one simply isn't in their class. It's better than an embarrassment like Ferrell's dud from last summer,
Land of the Lost, but again, not a difficult level to surpass. I'd say wait until this one is on DVD in a few months.
GRADE: C+