EDGE Orlando

As a film critic, you end up seeing hundreds of films per year. Many of them are not ever going to be viewed by your eyes again. Every once in a while, something comes along that makes you want watch it over--or, (gasp!) maybe even pay to see it a second time in theaters.

More often, however, films come along that actually insult your intelligence so much that if you weren’t required to stay until the end credits, you would have been saddled up to a bar before the second reel, trying to erase the memories of what you just watched. In order to wash away the memories of Dinner for Schmucks, you’d have to have at least a six pack, but a case would be more like it.

On paper, the film should have worked. At worst, it ought to have been mediocre. Jay Roach, who directed the Austin Powers and Meet the Parents franchises, is at the helm. Paul Rudd and Steve Carell star, with a host of other entertaining comedians filling out the supporting roles, and the movie comes with the imprimatur of success since it’s a remake of the French film Le diner de cons. The completely deceiving trailer released earlier this year made it look like this would be a fun, and funny, film.

Screenwriters David Guion and Michael Handelman hew fairly close to the original plot. The movie centers on Tim (Rudd, trying his hardest to make this another one of his well received, deadpan performances), who is trying to get ahead at the financial company he works. However, in order to get a promotion, he has to impress his boss at a monthly dinner where each guest competes to bring the biggest idiot with them so that everyone can have a laugh. When he accidentally hits Barry (Carell) with his car, Tim believes he has found the perfect idiot to get him that promotion.

That premise alone would have been enough for most movies. But Schmucks isn’t satisfied with being most movies, and so takes things a little further, incorporating an avant-garde artist who has an eye for Tim’s girlfriend--who also is more complicated than necessary, because she doesn’t approve of his attending the dinner, and she won’t accept his repeated proposals of marriage (even though she wants to remain with him for life; Tim’s one-night-stand-turned stalker might have something to do with this.)

Tossed in for good measure is a foreign millionaire, whose fortune Tim is trying to help manage. Ironically, Guion and Handelman have made a movie about simpletons who are too busy, with too much going on. Roach doesn’t help unclutter the film.

For more than an hour, Tim and Barry fall into one unfunny set up after another. It is not until almost the last half hour that they actually get to the dinner. Before that, they are running around a lot, with Barry unintentionally ruining Tim’s life every step of the way. Once the dinner begins, the film improves from painful to merely mediocre, but by the time this happens, there’s too little time left to make up for vast amount of unfunny material that one has already endured.

Part of the problem is that in terms of being a dark comedy, Dinner for Schmucks is marginally successful. The movie’s biggest accomplishment is being able to alienate the audience so totally that not even one character is worth liking. Even the hapless Barry is too much of an idiot to make him a lovable loser. As Tim tells his girlfriend, Barry is "a sweet guy, but he is a tornado of destruction," to the point that you kind of have to wonder how he has made it this far in life.

In the role of Tim, Rudd is playing another variation on the same character he has played in Role Models and a handful of other films, lending an even greater sense to the project that everyone is on autopilot here. Even Carell, who walks away from this disaster relatively unscathed, seems to be doing a more socially awkward version of his television persona. Only Zach Galifianakis seems to have his heart in it.

As if everything that we have sat through wasn’t bad enough, the last-minute epiphany about everyone being a person with feelings is a little ham-fisted. Despite having multiple promising elements, things never click together here. The film’s comic potential is squandered, and you would be a schmuck to shell out ten dollars and sit through it.