Dinner for Schmucks

Jeri Jacquin, Movie Maven

Opening in theatres this Friday from director Jay Roach and Paramount Pictures dishes up “Dinner for Schmucks”.

This film tells the story of Tim Conrad (Paul Rudd), an aspiring businessman who is trying to work his way up the ladder of success. One of the reasons for this is his lovely girlfriend Julie (Stephanie Szostak) who he thinks he still has to impress.

During a business meeting Tim impresses his boss Lance Fender (Bruce Greenwood) and is invited to attend the company dinner. The condition is Tim must bring someone entertaining – someone they can all basically make fun of.

Tim doesn’t want to participate and even tells Julie that he has no intention of participating. That is until he meets Barry Speck (Steve Carell), a man whose innocent nature can be mistaken as simple minded. Barry also has a creative side as he dresses dead mice he finds in the street.

Tim sees Barry as his way up the corporate ladder but not before Barry makes his life extremely miserable. From messing up his relationship with Julie to bringing back a psycho one-night stand - Barry is walking chaos.

FINAL WORD: Rudd has played this character before and he does it well, that being said it isn’t well enough. His character gets lost in the story somewhere and never quite recovers.

Carell has so much talent that it’s a shame to see it wasted here.  Although there were “awwwww” moments, there weren’t enough of them before the sympathy level for his character goes way down.

Zach Galifianakis as Therman is as close to the ridiculous as you can get. There wasn’t anything funny about his crazed mind controlling character and that was truly disappointing.

Other cast members include: Ron Livingston as Caldwell, Jeff Dunham as Lewis the Ventriloquist, Jermaine Clement as Keiran the Artist, Lucy Punch as Darla, Kristen Schaal as Susana – the bright intelligent spot of the film.

TUBS OF POPCORN: I give “Dinner for Schmucks” two tubs of popcorn out of five. The story goes on way to long and the gag is over a half hour into the film. From that point on it almost seems cruel to continue.

In all honesty the audience was put though a lot just screening this film. There were cute moments but it did not help the mangled story.

In the end – it takes one to know one.