Some comedies are like a finely crafted watch, dozens of perfectly placed pieces all ticking away to create the desired hilarity. Others get the same result just from letting Steve Carell pull faces. So be warned: the following review is based largely on the premise that you find Carell at the very least a halfway decent comedy performer, and being someone who enjoys Paul Rudd’s exasperated nice guy act wouldn’t hurt either.
More than any mainstream US comedy since Step Brothers, Dinner For Schmucks relies on the audience being willing to laugh at two guys just messing around, and if Carell and Rudd aren’t the guys for you then this isn’t the film for you either. Which is your loss: for a film with a premise lifted from a French film (Le Dinner de Cons) and based around a dinner that doesn’t even happen until three quarters of the way into the movie, Schmucks turns out to be surprisingly well paced and consistently hilarious showcase for a lot of very funny guys.
Tim Conrad (Rudd) is a sixth floor executive with a financial company, and his scheme to take advantage of a rich Swiss idiot (Little Britain’s David Walliams) seems a surefire way to move up to the executive seventh floor. But to seal the deal, he needs to find someone to take to the firms’ “dinner for winners”: a competition where, as Tim puts it, “you invite idiots to dinner and make fun of them”. He isn’t all that keen, his girlfriend Julie (Stephanie Szostak) is even less so, and it looks like he’s going to back out of the deal until he literally runs into Barry (Carell), an IRS employee whose hobby is making insanely detailed dioramas using dead mice.
Barry is also a bit of a social klutz, and with him around it’s not long before Julie is gone, Tim’s much feared stalker is in his apartment, his car is a wreck, he’s breaking into the apartment of the deadpan pretentious / oversexed artist Kieran (an unforgettable Jemaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords) and watching Barry’s boss (an equally memorable Zach Galifianakis) perform terrifying acts of mind control.
As you might have guessed it’s a bit of a grab-bag, but there’s enough variety in the scenes to keep the comedy fresh and pretty much all the supporting characters hit their roles out of the park. Rudd and Carell turn out to be a near-perfect double act, with Rudd’s exasperated, manic nice guy act a perfect foil for Carell, who gives the kind of broad, nutty, idiot man-child performance we haven’t seen from him since his Anchorman days.
There are a few moments where director Jay Roach (Meet the Fockers, the Austin Powers films) lets the sap rise and things threaten to get sentimental, but mostly it's kept in check; this is a film that wants you to laugh, and on the rare occasions it wants you to feel it’s only so you’ll feel okay about laughing. After all, if we didn’t feel something for Barry and his ilk, we’d be as bad as the evil executives – though even in the depths of their evil they realise that seeing the invention of the BLT sandwich re-enacted by dead mice playing The Earl of Sandwich and Sir Francis Bacon is something truly special.
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