What do you get when you take three Daily Show vets, fold in a side of Flight of the Conchords, add a dash of Hot Fuzz and a little sprinkling of Jeff Dunham (don't over-do that last ingredient or your dish might come out a little racist-y)? Well, you get Dinner For Schmucks, which looks appetizing — but then again, so did that cake you accidentally baked with salt instead of sugar.
Dinner for Schmucks should have been incredible. It has a great cast, a promising premise and is being released after a parade of summer flops. But instead it's lame, with a stupid rom-com central storyline and a thinly drawn main character, Tim (Rudd).
To summarize, Tim must find an idiot to bring to an executive dinner in order to secure a promotion. He makes the mistake of divulging this challenge to his incredibly uptight other half, who quickly gets all purse-lipped and tells him he mustn't. Tim almost listens to her, but when he runs down a sad, sad taxidermist named Barry (Carell) with his Porsche, he decides that fate is telling him to go to the frat boy dinner and get that job.
This article appears in Jul 22-28, 2010.