Hey, everyone. Capone in Chicago here.

After being in a string of high-profile uproariously funny comedies since 2004's ANCHORMAN (including THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN, KNOCKED UP, FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL, ROLE MODELS, and I LOVE YOU MAN, all of which made me pee my pants from laughing so hard), Rudd has made a film that maybe doesn't feature the gut-twisting belly laughs of old, but still had me giggling non-stop for the better part of two hours. The feat probably would not have been possible without a handful of laser-sharp comedic performances led by Steve Carell (Rudd's ANCHORMAN and VIRGIN co-star), who is trying harder than any other human being would have to make us laugh, with mostly positive results.

DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS is a sugar-coated remake of THE DINNER GAME, one of darkest, nastiest French comedies ever made. In the original, the character played by Rudd is a true master in the art of being an asshole. In Schmucks, Rudd's Tim is, well, quite Ruddian. He's a genuinely nice guy, who has a lovely girlfriend (Stephanie Szostak) he thinks is too good for him. He's living beyond his means and is fighting at his investment firm to climb the corporate ladder and get a significant pay raise.

When opportunity knocks thanks to a key presentation made to his boss (STAR TREK's Bruce Greenwood), Tim is invited to a dinner at the boss' house, during which each guest brings one remarkable idiot (mimes are not allowed--too cliche). The man who brings the best moron is the winner. Tim begrudgingly agrees to participate and fortunately runs into Barry (Carell), an IRS auditor whose hobby is constructing dioramas of famous paintings or scenes in history using costumed dead mice as the characters. Watching Barry construct these results in some the film's most incredible moments, seriously. And bringing him to this dinner seems like a sure-fire win for Tim.

Through a series of overloaded contrivances, Tim and Barry end up spending a couple days together during some of Tim's most important life turning points. There are troubles with the girlfriend; he's having trouble landing an important client; and a woman he slept with three years earlier is still stalking him. Let's focus on that plot point, if we may. I'm a big, big fan of British comic actress Lucy Punch, who plays the stalkerish one-night-stand Darla, but watching her play a character so ridiculous took me right out of the movie at light speed. Those scenes simply don't work. Schmucks is sparingly peppered with moments like that, and the cumulative effect is that it waters down what could have been a much better film. I still liked what I saw, but there are two or three key sequences where you can feel the life and fun draining from the screen.

Not that there's any point in assigning blame for this shortfall, but not a single person in this movie isn't giving it their all, including the remarkable Jemaine Clement ("Flight of the Conchords) as the self-obsessed artist Kieran. Words cannot describe how great this man is in this movie, and the moments with him and Carell are my favorite in the film. Also quite good is Zach Galifianakis (THE HANGOVER) as Barry's co-worker, the man who stole his wife, and a master of mind control (which is different than brain control, I learned from this movie). I have a sneaking suspicion that if you just leave Zach alone in a room, funny things will happen. That's kind of what this is. And when the film does finally roll around the the actual dinner, the laughs are almost non-stop. The final 30 minutes or so of DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS make a lot of the film's ills a whole lot easier to handle.

Back to that blame thing, if I may. The screenplay from David Guion and Michael Handelman (co-writers on the terrible Zach Braff movie THE EX) is weak; there's no getting around that. You can almost feel director Jay Roach (the AUSTIN POWERS trilogy and the first two MEET THE PARENTS movies) taking the skeleton story of said weak script, throwing it to the actors, and saying, "Do something with that." And for the most part, they rise to the occasion. As much as you might assume Rudd takes on the straight man role in DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS, that's not exactly the case. His reactions to Carell and the other fools that cross his path are as much a part of what makes us laugh as the more outward elements of humor. They are few actors that can pull that off as convincingly as Rudd, and that's probably why he's so beloved. Amen.

DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS is far from the funniest movie of the summer (I may have seen that the same day I went to the SCHMUCKS screening; more on that later in the month), but it has enough to keep a smile on your face for the duration, and it's enough of a satisfying placeholder for Rudd fans until the end of the year when we find out what he does in his collaboration with James L. Brooks and Jack Nicholson in EVERYTHING YOU'VE GOT.

-- Capone
capone@aintitcool.com
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