Schmuckity-Muck

If mouse taxidermy didn't make you uncomfortable before, it will now.

Dinner For Schmucks

starring Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, Zach Galifianakis, Jemaine Clement, Stephanie Szostak, Lucy Punch, Bruce Greenwood, Ron Livingston

directed by Jay Roach

And so the long line of unoriginal movie making for Summer 2010 continues with Dinner For Schmucks, the latest comedy from the man who brought you the Austin Powers trilogy as well as Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers. It takes its premise from the modern French classic The Dinner Game, and Jay Roach gives it an American twist. Turns out it doesn’t hurt having two of Hollywood’s leading funny men on the bill, either.

After years of performing grunt work, Tim (Rudd) finally gets the opportunity he’s been waiting for; he successfully impresses his boss Mr. Fender (Greenwood) and has a shot at that big promotion he needs to marry his long time girlfriend Julie (Szostak). There’s one catch; each month, Fender and the other execs get together for a dinner. Each of them bring an idiot along, make fun of them all night long, and at the end of the dinner Fender chooses which idiot is the biggest idiot of all. Tim must come to the dinner, idiot in tow, to get his foot in the door. By chance, Tim literally runs into Barry (Carell). Barry is a slightly eccentric amateur taxidermist; it might be more accurate to say Barry obsessively picks up dead rats, clothes them like people, and makes murals out of them. Tim invites Barry to the dinner, and that’s around the time everything in Tim’s life goes wrong. Julie leaves him, he throws out his back, he chokes a big business deal, and an obsessive ex-girlfriend finds out where he lives. What’s the cause of Tim’s misery? The weird, haphazard, idiotic antics of Barry.

I’m not sure how to put this lightly; Dinner For Schmucks really, really sucks. Instead of being a smart, subtle, and at times poignant movie like The Dinner Game, the film makers try to take it in a completely different direction. The film comes off like its aiming for something in between situational and slap-stick comedy; sadly, it ends up beinga horrible and at times overly crude train wreck instead. The mouse-taxidermy is so prevalent it gets unsettling. Snappy one liners are exchanged for random and indecipherable yelling. And to top it off, pointless and off topic toilet humor that just doesn’t work. Imagine taking a classic Monty Python skit while Americanizing the humor, dumbing it way down, and bastardizing everything else good about it; that’s Dinner For Schmucks.

The performances are just as bad as the film itself. Paul Rudd and Steve Carell are both known for their zinging one liners and characterizations of slightly off people. Their respective roles are polar opposites; suffice it to say that neither had their best performance, and I’ll blame it on bad casting. They should have never been in this movie to begin with. Stephanie Szostack is zombie-like in her performance; a pretty face to be sure, but it’ll take more than a few fake tears to be a good actress. Even Zach Galifianakis doesn’t make a good performance out of this flick. I mean granted, he’s the only person in the movie who gives something worth laughing at, but we’ve seen him do better.

Skip it. Don’t waste your money. If Dinner For Schmucks is a good example of what American slap stick comedy can be, you can count me out of ever seeing another one. Here’s the sad truth: I went in to Dinner For Schmucks expecting it to be a pretty lack luster flick and it turned out to be so much worse than I was expecting. It falls somewhere in the cow pasture between Jonah Hex and Death at a Funeral; either way you look at it, it is still sitting in a big steaming pile of crap.