The Dinner Game! - ‘Dinner for Schmucks’ Review

We've been lied to so many times by movie titles, which is why it's so nice when a movie comes along that has as accurate a title as Dinner For Schmucks, which is about exactly that and nothing else. A lot of businessmen get together and plan a private dinner where everyone brings a schmuck as a guest, and the guy with the biggest idiot wins. So simple, and yet so effective. Paul Rudd plays Tim, the ambitious, rising businessman who finds himself with a new friend cleverly named Barry Speck (Steve Carell) who is so clingy that he makes Jim Carrey's Cable Guy, my other favorite freakishly obsessive new friend, pale in comparison.

The comedy comes from a two-pronged assault on the heartlessness of wealthy business executives and the cluelessness of modern society's hopelessly oblivious geeks, although I have to say that it's the latter that's overdone here. Unfortunately, Carell's Barry is a genuine idiot, which will create kind of a love or hate situation. I get the feeling that most people are going to laugh until their faces hurt or will find his character immediately and intolerably irritating.

Personally, I thought he was hilarious, even though his sad obliviousness created some feelings of sympathy for him that are ultimately detrimental to the comedy. It's hard to laugh at someone that you sort of feel sorry for, you know? And the fact that it's the super-rich CEO's of America pulling the whole thing off doesn't really help much either.

But no matter, I'm gonna argue that Barry's a compelling comedic character either way. How could you not be interested in a man who has such vacuous social skills, but who spends his time making stunning dioramas populated with dead, stuffed mice. These things are so good that they just about steal the show, which is to be expected, since they're the creations of the same three guys responsible for the weirdly realistic puppets in Team America: World Police.

I used to think you couldn't possibly go wrong with Steve Carell until I saw Dan in Real Life and realized how wrong I was to assume such a thing, but in his third venture with Paul Rudd, the two have once again proved their comedic brilliance on screen in this adaptation of the 1998 French film The Dinner Game, which provides the inspiration for director Jay Roach (who we have to thank for the Austin Powers movies, the Meet the Parents movies, and the almost forgotten but outstanding 1999 film Mystery, Alaska). Roach is the craftsman of a few of the most successful American comedies of the last 15 years or so, and while Dinner For Schmucks is no classic, it's definitely one of the best comedies in theaters right now, although he's taken considerable liberties with the original story. 

Not that there's really much wrong with that, in this case. I liked the original movie, and I liked Dinner for Schmucks (almost the same, actually), but for different reasons. The original movie featured a lot of comedic situations that are kind of specific to French culture, so changing some things like that and altering the film's climax makes the movie more accessible to an American audience, rather than just dumbing down the material for the lowest common denominator, as Hollywood generally does.

The movie also features an extensive array of characters in its ensemble cast, including the ever-watchable Zack Galifianakis as the extremely confident yet diminutive boss who stole Barry's wife, Bruce Greenwood as the boss who dreams up the whole dinner thing, and my favorite, David Walliams (no, that's not a typo) as an eccentric millionaire whose account Tim needs to win in order to save his career. Walliams is one of the stars of the almost weirdly hilarious TV shows "Little Britain" and "Little Britain USA," both of which I highly recommend.

Overall, what the movie lacks in originality, it makes up for in the onscreen chemistry of its stars, the extensive cast of memorable characters, and the fact that they were smart enough to stay away from toilet humor, which has become much too common in modern American comedies. I'm going to go ahead and suggest that jokes involving farts and feces and flinging bodily fluids and whatnot can finally, officially be left in the past forever. They're just not funny, and I'm so glad to see a mainstream screwball comedy come along that realizes this.

That alone allows it forgiveness for so many other things, such as the fact that both Paul Rudd and Steve Carell are playing characters noticeably less interesting than ones they've each played in the past, but most of all, I'm just glad to find myself fairly impressed with a mainstream comedy again. That hasn't happened for a while.

The Bean Meter