Movie Review: Dinner for Schmucks
July 29 2010, Published 8:00 a.m. ET
In Dinner for Schmucks, Paul Rudd and Steve Carell play an odd-ball pair of unlikely friends with a lot to teach other and an avalanche of catastrophe along the way. Rudd plays pretty-boy Tim, an ambitious businessman with a mean streak, while Carell plays Barry, a quirky guy with no social skills who wreaks havoc on Tim’s life. The broad farce is beefed up with physical comedy aplenty (a car crash! a sword fight! flying wine bottles!), and chugs along unevenly, with a hilarious joke here and poignant moment there mixed in with pregnant, squirm-worthy scenes that just won’t end.
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Much of the movie is supposed to be squirm-worthy: Tim’s main goal is to get a promotion and impress his artsy girlfriend Julie (Stephanie Szostack) enough so that she’ll marry him. So when his boss invites him to a dinner where the powerful make fun of misfits, he jumps at the chance -- even if he has to bring an idiot with him. Julie, however, isn’t down with the dinner, rightly decrying it as “messed up.” Still, when Tim literally runs his Porsche into hapless Barry, he can’t help but think it was meant to happen (which becomes its own little running joke).