By: Lauren Cohen, The Campus Movie Guru (University of Miami)
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Eager to impress his boss in order to get a promotion that’s right at his fingertips, Tim (Paul Rudd) is on the quest to find the perfect person to bring to his boss’s dinner party. But it’s not just any regular dinner party. It’s a “dinner for idiots” where everyone competes to see who can bring the most ridiculous guest…which Tim finds in Barry (Steve Carell).
If the story seems somewhat contrived, thats because it is. But that aside for a moment, the storyline made for some pretty hysterical moments. Once the words “Ladies and Gentleman, dinner is served” were uttered, I knew I was in for a treat. And like the title might imply, you would like that the majority of this movie would take place at said dinner, right? Wrong. I wish it had. But 90% of the movie dealt with Tim trying to deal with Barry and all the ridiculous stuff he was getting him into due to his extreme idiocy (we’re talking a level of idiocy that at some points I found it difficult to like his character). All that was fine, and even very funny…if you are a fan of those comedies where everything just keeps going wrong and goes from bad to worse. I don’t mean that sarcastically…some people truly love these kind of films. I always wish I had, but the thing is, when I watch movies like that, I just get insanely frustrated. Like I felt physical pain, at some points having to restrain myself from trying to take my pain out on someone, anyone, just to release some frustration. But the theater was in hysterics, so that might be more of a personal flaw than a fault on the movie’s part, I don’t know. More annoying to me than the series of events that unfolded were the main character, Tim’s reactions to them. He acted in ways that at some points put him on the same stupidity level as Steve Carell’s character, no easy feat. It got the point where I thought to myself: “No promotion is worth this sort of torture” and found it hard to believe that Tim didn’t feel the same way.
Now that I’ve finally released that frustration thats been laying dormant in me since seeing the film…I actually liked the movie, and recommend it. There are a lot of good laughs and Steve Carell and Paul Rudd are at the top of their game. Zach Galifianakis is great too, but isn’t in the film as much as I would have liked and only really has the same one running joke the whole movie. I thought the movie had more potential than the end result yielded, this is true. But seeing Steve Carell with his “mousterpieces,” Zach Galifinakis with his “mind control” and the hilarious group of other “schmucks” at the end dinner scene is really too good to pass up, frustration or not.
Rating: B-
