Movie Review: Dinner for Schmucks

Dinner for Schmucks is the third movie that stars both Paul Rudd and Steve Carell, but it’s far different from The 40-Year-Old-Virgin or Anchorman. Instead, Dinner for Schmucks is a lighthearted, but largely forgettable comedy that wastes the cast’s best efforts. It’s oddly formulaic for such a promising premise, full of the same misunderstandings and mishaps that we’ve all seen too many times before.

The movie stars Rudd as Tim, an executive who is looking to rise up the ranks of his company. In order to do so, he has to attend his boss’ dinner. There’s just one caveat: each employee has to bring an idiot to dinner, and the biggest idiot wins that employee a promotion. Carell plays Barry, who is Rudd’s guest. Naturally, Rudd plays his impressive straight-man self as usual, while Carell does his best to make lame jokes that are usually in a sixth-grade boy’s repertoire even remotely funny to an audience. He is actually fairly successful, offering a more hit than miss performance, though I will say that Barry’s taxidermy hobby is actually quite impressive rather than something to mock.

Jemaine Clement, most notably from the comedy duo Flight of the Conchords, gives the funniest performance of the movie as an eccentric artist, though I could never get over the fact that, with his long hair and witty, sometimes existential, one-liners, he reminded me of Russell Brand’s Aldous Snow from Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek.

Dinner for Schmucks certainly had more potential, especially if it had decided to dive headfirst into the slapstick route, but the story and characters consistently stay safe and relatively stale. The dinner itself, which should have been the pay-off to an entire movie full of build-up, comes off as rushed and is one of the more lackluster moments of the entire movie. Even Zach Galifianakis’ eccentric brand of comedy can’t thrive in this.

That being said, Dinner for Schmucks is not a terrible movie, but the writing sure does border on it. Like Carell’s Date Night, the performances bring this movie back from the edge of a volcano full of wretchedness. However, even they can’t stop Schmucks from being lumped in with the rest of the movies that have helped to make this one of the longest, most bland years for film in recent memory.

It’s never a bad thing to see Paul Rudd and Steve Carell working together, but Dinner for Schmucks should only whet the appetite for a movie that might never come: Anchorman 2.