Review by Rolling Stones

When Hollywood decides to remake French farce by Francis Veber, the result can be a champagne cocktail (La Cage Aux Folles spawning The Birdcage) or pâté de merde (Les Compères degenerating into Father’s Day). Dinner for Schmucks, adapted from Veber’s Le Dîner De Cons, falls somewhere in the middle. What makes the soufflé rise is the actors. Steve Carell is a comic wonder as the film’s No. 1 schmuck. Carell’s Barry Speck is an IRS auditor who spends his spare time as an amateur taxidermist, stuffing dead mice to star in his dioramas (wait till you see his “Last Supper”). That makes Barry a prize find for Tim Conrad (Paul Rudd), an L.A. financial analyst ready to rise in the ranks if he can win the monthly dinner game held by his boss, Lance Fender (Bruce Greenwood).

Lance challenges his execs to find the biggest idiot and bring the fool to dinner to be mocked. Tim’s girlfriend, Julie (Stephanie Szostak), is rightly horrified. But when Tim runs down and nearly kills Barry with his Porsche, it’s manna from fool heaven.

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Review by Reel Views

There’s something a little “off” with Dinner for Schmucks. The premise, borrowed from Francis Veber’s 1999 French farce, The Dinner Game, hasn’t improved significantly as a result of its translation into English. The film is sporadically amusing but gives the impression it should be generating more laughs than it does. In the end, it goes for the “warm, fuzzy” feeling that so many comedies make their goal, thereby undermining any potential Dinner for Schmucks might have as a dark and cynical endeavor.

Director Jay Roach is the man behind two highly successful comedy franchises: working with Mike Myers, he created and helmed the Austin Powers saga, and his collaboration with Ben Stiller resulted in the birth of the Fockers.

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Review by EW

No schmucks were harmed in the making of Dinner for Schmucks. That’s the problem. The promising crudeness of the title, along with the combined talents of stars Steve Carell and Paul Rudd, suggests that at some point, surely, someone will rise to the occasion and behave with unrepentant obnoxiousness. But in a rare tonal misfire, director Jay Roach (Austin Powers, Meet the Parents) delivers a bland, summer-sloppy comedy that never risks actually swimming with schmucks and letting characters bruise themselves on outcroppings of mean fun. Instead, he has decided to sand away all the sharp edges.

What’s left is a nice, safe comedy of tolerance and repentance — a subpar Carell-and-Rudd odd-couple buddy movie.

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