The Dinner

"Dinner for Schmucks" has a clever title but it needed to spend more time on the main course. The audience is subjugated to almost one and a half hours of build up time before the dinner bell rings. It's not time wasted though, the story does make good use of its two hour run time. However, I felt like I was on a plane taxiing down the runway trying to get up enough speed to take off and once in flight the plane kept dipping and then pulling back up; then it finally it made an abrupt landing and the flight was over.

We are first introduced to Tim (played by Paul Rudd), an investment analyst, who is presented an opportunity to pounce on a new promotion at work. The story is set up as most business tales are told. The boss has an important client, the main character is presented with a once in a life time opportunity to prove his worth and so on and so forth. While in the process he learns something about himself.

The business men (one of whom is played by Ron Livingston from "Office Space" fame) are the typical jerks who will do anything to keep on top of the dog pile. In this particular dog pile they also like to pick on the smaller, weaker dogs. It just so happens that the big dogs are having their "dinner for winners" in a few days. Tim now has a great chance to prove to his boss he will go to any length to earn the new position. The catch is that he has to find a loser to bring to dinner. They then have a contest, unbeknown to the losers, to see who the biggest schmuck is.

Tim finds his loser immediately the next day not by chance but because as Tim so wisely says "everything happens for a reason". Welcome aboard, Barry (played by Steve Carell), here the story starts picking up a little steam. Barry has a unique talent of finding the positive in almost any situation, he mispronounces words that any 5th grader knows, works for the IRS and in his spare time works on his "Mouseterpieces". A perfect fit for Tim. A "Mouseterpiece" is Barry's taxidermy side projects where he takes dead mice and mounts them in familiar historical and everyday scenarios (i.e. The Last Supper, mice having a picnic, Whistler's Mother, etc).

A lot of activity happens in that single night before the big dinner; Tim and Barry break into one of Tim's girlfriend's biggest clients' homes and finds him in a weird sexual perversion act. Next Barry accidentally invites Tim's ex-fling, Darla, over to the apartment and the first laugh riot is finally given to the audiences through a funny fight scene between Barry and Darla. Then it is on to the IRS to talk to Barry's boss, Therman (played by Zach Galifianakis), who is also a self proclaimed mind reader. Have you noticed they still haven't made it to the dinner yet? The next day Tim has a brunch appointment with a potential multi million dollar client where Barry and Darla show up trying to smooth things over. Again the straight man, Tim, and goofy man, Barry, routine starts up and we are given another good laugh. It was a pretty easy set up; take a high pressure situation and place it in any restaurant that has a Maitre d' next mix in a socially inept character such as Barry and something funny is bound to happen.

After all of this we are finally taken out to dinner. The peculiar thing was that the dinner only lasts 15 minutes. This was a shame because the story could have spent more time on the losers that came to dinner. There was some great talent there, one being Jeff Dunham, a humorous ventriloquist who has been working stand up clubs for the last two decades. It felt like the director (Jay Roach) should have pumped the brakes, slowed up and gave these losers some more screen time. We did get another laugh riot when Therman and Barry had an invisible shoot out between their mind reading capabilities. Then it was over with a nice epilogue to the story through Barry's "Mouseterpieces".

Should you see this movie? Ummm…OK, why not? There were some funny bits to it, the storyline was solid and the comedic actors were funny but didn't have to try too hard for the jokes. Rudd plays a good straight man in these situations where Carell and Galifianakis can play off of him quite easily.

Not only is it hilarious, it has a great message. To be able to tell a meaningful story about friendship, acceptance and triumph over adversity surrounded by physical comedy and ridiculous characters isn't easy to do. This one nails it!

I think it was the great comedian Edmund Gwenn who made the statement that "Dying is easy, comedy is hard." That is probably true but I am convinced that there are some actors who can make comedy look easy. At his best, Steve Carrell does just that. In 'Dinner for Schmucks' he occupies the role of Barry Speck, a blithering idiot for whom life is a jolly holiday and cynicism is a notion that seems to have passed him over. Barry's view of the world is devoid of irony or whimsy, he stares blankly with wide eyes and a stupid grin and never seems to understand what is happening right in front of him.

Let me give you an example. Near the beginning of the movie, Barry is being seduced by a blond bimbo who tells him that she thinks she needs a spanking. We get this exchange:

The Blond: "I'm a naughty school girl. I've been bad." Barry: "You look a little old to be a school girl" The Blond: "You're my schoolmaster. I need to be punished." Barry: "I'm not really qualified for that. I work for the IRS."

That kind of idiocy makes Barry the perfect tool for Tim Conrad (Paul Rudd), a mid-level financial executive who curries favor with his implacable boss Lance Fender (Bruce Greenwood) when he manages to sell a Swiss billionaire on the idea of turning defective bombs into effective, yet unattractive, lamps. Fender is impressed and invites Tim to an annual dinner party at his mansion, a "Dinner for Winners" in which the purpose is for each guest to bring the biggest idiot they can find. The guest with the most entertaining idiot wins a trophy.

The journey getting to that dinner party mostly involves Tim trying to survive Barry's idiocy. He has a way of saying and doing the most outrageous things while maintaining a demeanor that lets us believe that he hasn't the slightest clue that his behavior is the least bit odd, even his hobby of making cute dioramas with dead mice.

The first half of the film is genuinely funny, as it observes Barry and his world as he looks out with wide eyes, a goofy smile. Yet, the rest of the movie is spotty. Once we get to know Barry, the movie tries to mix a riot of slapstick comedy with moments of sentimentality that are mostly made up of half-baked speeches about the value of friendship.

The third act gets the film back on track somewhat as we finally arrive at that dinner party. What works are the simple observations about Barry and the other morons in attendance (one of whom is Jeff Dunham who is in a marital spat with one of his dummies). Those characters are funny but the scene goes overboard with a very long battle involving Barry and a nitwit mind-reader named Thurman Munch (Zach Galifianakis) who wears Dickies over his shirts and has a self-satisfied autobiography called "Your Mind Is My Puppet". The scene quickly spirals into a very bizarre area reminiscent of some of Monty Python's lesser sketches.

Steve Carrell is the the entire reason for seeing 'Dinner for Schmucks'. His wonderful performance is pitch perfect, playing a lovable dolt who genuinely believes what he says, even when he confesses to Tim that the reason his wife left his that "I lost her clitoris". To see the deadpan look in his eyes is to understand that Barry believes this statement completely. It is also possibly to understand why his wife really left him.

*** (of four)

you know there's a good chance it's going to be funny. Also Paul Rudd was good too. Rudd plays Tim, a businessman up for a promotion. His boss invites him to a dinner party in which guests bring someone with a special talent that makes them look stupid. The idea is to make fun of them. Reluctantly, Tim agrees to do it even with his disapproving girlfriend, Julie. He literally runs into Barry, played by Carell and Tim soon realizes Barry would be just the one to invite to this dinner. His talent is stuffing dead mice and creating scenes with them.

Problem is Barry shows up the day before the dinner party and Tim just can't get rid of him. Barry creates all these hilarious problems with Julie and inviting over Tim's stalker, Darla. The funniest scene is when Tim meets the swiss couple at the restaurant and Barry shows up to solve the problem of a missing Julie by bringing Darla. That had me LOL. Next funniest part was the mind control by Zack G. over Barry and his wife and the pudding. There's too many funny things to list them all.

FINAL VERDICT: By far this was the funniest comedy I've seen in quite a long time. I highly recommend it.

In order to impress his girlfriend, Tim (Paul Rudd) needs to secure a promotion. So he decides to accept his bosses challenge; bring an 'idiot' to their annual 'Dinner for Winners'. A competition run by white-collar executives and disguised as a celebration of brilliance in unrecognised individuals. In reality, the meal is simply an opportunity for elitist senior-management types to laugh at some quirky and eccentric members of society. Tim's girlfriend tries to convince him the whole idea is abhorrent. Just as he is beginning to agree with her, he meets Barry (Steve Carell). An IRS worker, with a passion for creating art from taxidermied mice, Barry might just be the perfect man to help Tim win the competition.

The US version of The Office has shown us that Carell can do awkward better than most and Anchorman proved his capabilities of making stupidity funny. However, his character here is completely unlikeable and, more often than not, irritating. His bowl haircut, glasses and protruding teeth, evoke bad seventies sitcoms. A time when this look would have been a stylists shorthand for 'socially inept'. Paul Rudd, on the other hand, is given little opportunity to make us laugh, playing two-dimensional straight man, Tim. Director Jay Roach's previous franchises (Austin Powers, Meet the Parents/Fockers) may not have been the greatest comedies of the past fifteen years, but delivered as and when expected. The problems with Dinner for Schmucks lie in the pacing and the writing. With a 114 minute runtime, it is simply too long. Entire characters and subplots are superfluous. It also suffers badly from second-act-drag, believing that given enough on-screen time we will somehow empathise with our two leads.

Producer Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat, Bruno), seems to have called in a number of favours from celebrity friends and cast them in every available role. The idea, presumably, is that good performances can boost a weak script into something amusing. Of Course, this is not the case. Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords) as avant-garde artiste, Kieran, makes the most of his characters nonsequiturs but only manages to raise a smirk at best. The same cannot be said for David Walliams (Little Britain), whose Swiss, aristocratic character, Mueller, is completely redundant in every way. The only worthy gag in almost two-hours is provided by Chris O' Dowd (The I.T. Crowd) as a blind swordsman. However having only a handful of lines and appearing twenty minutes before the credits roll, its far too little, far too late.

Dinner for Schmucks starts with a premise full of comedic opportunities, but spends the next hour and a half ignoring these. The original, a French film from 1998 entitled The Dinner Game, was a social satire focusing on the ridiculous measures the aristocracy will go to amuse themselves. It was full of witty dialogue and, at 80 minutes long, it worked. As often happens, Hollywood seems to have missed the point and delivered a broad and bland remake.