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 Now screening [M]
Director: Jay Roach
Runtime: 114mins.
Francis Veber has made a career out of directing films in France – in fact, he’s pretty much the face of an entire genre: French farce – lightweight comedies that usually make a fortune at the French box office, and inevitably end up being optioned by Hollywood for recycling by B-grade directors and actors into the kind of sub-par pap that makes most intelligent audiences vomit a little in their mouths. So when Veber’s comedy, The Dinner Game, made tens of millions of dollars back in 1999, it was inevitable that some ponytailed prat in Hollywood would pick it up. Director Jay Roach ended up being tapped on the shoulder to anglicise The Dinner Game, and there are few more qualified to mess things up than Mr Roach – Meet the Parents was harmless and mildly entertaining; Meet The Fockers was execrable; and the upcoming Little Fockers? Well, I guess you’ll be the judge.
Paul Rudd takes on the role Pierre Brochant made famous in the original. Rudd’s Tim is an ambitious financial analyst intent on moving up to the next floor of the corporation run by his money-hungry employer, Lance Fender (Bruce Greenwood). He has a beautiful girlfriend, Julie (Stephanie Szostak), who is about to curate a high-profile exhibition of outrageous artwork by the sickeningly sauve Kieran (Flight Of The Conchords’ Jemaine Clement), and hopes to impress her – and his boss – by brokering a multi-million dollar deal with former arms broker, Müeller (Little Britain’s David Walliams). The problem is that the deal can only be cemented if Tim attends a special dinner hosted by Fender; the clincher is that he needs to bring an idiot as a partner to compete with those brought by Fender’s other guests. The resulting collection of idiots will be judged by the guests to find the biggest fool. Of course, Tim is appalled by the suggestion, but after a mobile phone call causes him to run down the gormless Barry (Steve Carell), he wonders whether fate may have handed him the keys to the corner office he and his colleagues have been lusting after.
Where Veber’s version was cruel, vintage farce, Roach and his writers have morphed the idea into an unnecessarily complicated and overlong slapstick mess. Carell tries valiantly to make Barry interesting, but the best things about Dinner For Schmucks were Barry’s intricate mouse dioramas and his cuckolded comment about curling up into the ‘fecal position’.
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TIM MILFULL
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