Salt Lake Tribune Review

As dinners go, the farcical “Dinner for Schmucks” is all hors d’oeuvre and no main course — a lot of tasty bits, but nothing substantial.

The story, pinched from Francis Veber’s 1998 French farce “The Dinner Game,” begins with Tim Conrad (Paul Rudd), an ambitious financial analyst eager to get a promotion to join his firm’s high-rolling sales team. His boss, Lance Fender (Bruce Greenwood), explains that his top employees join him once a month for a special dinner — where each employee must bring a guest, an “idiot,” whose dorky talents become fodder for the boss’s derision. Tim tells his girlfriend, Julie (Stephanie Szostak), an art-gallery curator, that he won’t take part in such cruelty, but she soon realizes he’s lying.

The perfect “idiot” lands in Tim’s lap — or, more precisely, on the hood of his car — in the form of Barry Speck (Steve Carell), a nerdy IRS employee and amateur taxidermist who creates historical and artistic dioramas using dead and stuffed mice. Barry also turns out to be “a tornado of destruction,” and in short order he causes Tim to throw out his back, get dumped by Julie, get reintroduced to a psycho one-night stand (Lucy Punch) and be threatened with a tax audit.

Barry would be enough wackiness for any regular movie. But director Jay Roach (the man behind the “Austin Powers” films) and writers David Guion and Michael Handelman (who collaborated on the Zack Braff comedy “The Ex”) gild their lily with more crazy characters — such as Barry’s overbearing boss Therman (Zack Galifianakis), a self-taught mentalist, and Kieran (“Flight of the Conchords’ ” Jemaine Clement), a self-centered art photographer who drops off-the-wall comments such as “Barry, have you ever spent five months living with a herd of goats? No? That surprises me.” And that’s before the title dinner that constitutes the movie’s over-the-top finale.

Roach allows plenty of room for his cast to get in their funny bits, and there are
plenty of laugh-out-loud moments. Carell, particularly, thrives in this free-for-all, as he throws himself completely into Barry’s blissfully ignorant mind-set.

But the Hollywood need for closure, for hugs and happiness, even when the material cries out for savage wit, ultimately dooms “Dinner for Schmucks.” What could have been a red-meat farce ends as a bland, flavorless and forgettable meal.

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