Dinner for Schmucks: An Unsatisfying Comedic Buffet

Dinner for Schmucks is a comedy about a man named Tim (played by Paul Rudd) who is trying to work his way up the corporate ladder. After coming up with a good business concept, Tim gets invited to a “Dinner for Winners” by his boss. He is instructed to find the biggest “schmuck” and take him to a dinner to be laughed at.  Luckily for Tim, he literally crashes into his schmuck, Barry (Steve Carell), one day on the street and thinks his search has been successful.  Not quite.  Long story short, Tim’s girlfriend Julie (Stephanie Szostak) doesn’t approve of the whole “stepping on and climbing over others to get ahead” technique and Tim spends the rest of the movie trying (and failing) to win Julie back and stop Barry from making a complete fool of himself at the dinner. The plot of the film is not very cohesive and thus the many subplots have difficulty tying in with the main plot. Though the subplots do eventually converge at the end (albeit, in a very roundabout fashion), the journey getting there is convoluted and sometimes painful to watch.

Let’s talk about the schmuck of the hour, Barry. It’s nearly impossible not to love Carell, in any movie.  And although you’ll probably fall in love with his Schmuck’s character, you may also find him to be almost too oblivious. His brainless antics easily induce true laughter a few times throughout the film, but there are too many instances where the audience is simply overwhelmed with the obvious fact that Barry is a complete idiot. We get it already!

The overall message of the movie (if there is one) also seems unclear. The audience is constantly coaxed into laughing and poking fun at Barry all throughout the bulk of the movie, and is then almost scolded for doing so. Maybe the point is just to show us who the true schmucks really are: us. Nevertheless, the audience is misled.  It’s like a mother feeding her children nothing but cookies and ice cream for a month, and then putting them on weight watchers one day, without warning, and slapping away their sticky, outstretched little hands. By the end of the movie you’ll have all the compassion in the world for Barry, but you’ll still probably want to laugh at him.

Although Dinner for Schmucks seemed promising at first glance, it made one common mistake found in comedies today—it gave away most of the funniest parts in the previews, before the dinner even began. The appetizer previews were deliciously enticing, but the main course was not as filling. There was a wide variety in the virtual buffet of funny scenarios, but they failed to deliver the final satisfaction prominent in a “less is more” approach, that may well have salvaged the film.  At the end of this overcooked and over-thought experience you are left with nothing more than a bad taste in your mouth.  

With such an incredible cast comes incredibly high expectations.  Dinner for Schmucks continually fell just short of incorporating the magic recipe that could have made it a classic.  If you are looking for nothing more than a few good laughs, this movie will satisfy your appetite. But it may be a better idea to run to your nearest Blockbuster and rent last season’s episodes of The Office on DVD.