09/03/09 - Role Models

Role Models (2008, 101 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0430922/

This was a comedy I'd meant to check out for a while and just now got around to it. I don't know why I'd wanted to see a comedy, but I had. I guess some of the stuff I've seen lately has actually been grittier movies and I wanted a break (obviously I'm not counting that thing passed off as a movie named Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus).

The film stars Paul Rudd as Danny Donahue and Seann William Scott as Wheeler. Sentenced to 150 hours of community service in a Big Brother type program called Sturdy Wings and run by Gayle Sweeny (Jane Lynch) they must each deal with a troubled child. Assigned to Donahue is Augie Farks (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), a role playing fanatic while Wheeler gets the loud-mouthed Ronnie Shields (Bobb'e J. Thompson). Playing Donahue's love interest is Elizabeth Banks as Beth.

The acting is fine, here, but nothing great. In my opinion Thompson does a great job for being so young. At first, I found him quite annoying, but as the movie developed, I found him more and more tolerable and eventually even quite comical. The highlight performance of the movie without a doubt. Rudd and Scott are good, but nothing exceptional. Though, as I'll write about below, this can't entirely be blamed on them. The rest of the cast sometimes overacts and it shows. This is most noticeable with Lynch, but she also has some of the stupidest lines in the film, so again it's not entirely her fault.

The biggest problem with the movie I had was that I just didn't care about anybody. It seemed torn between making the main duo flat characters that were doomed to fail or as realistic characters that were trying to succeed and just ended up failing. The switching between these two choices made me not even care if Donahue and Wheeler succeeded in the whole community service thing, but it also hurt the rest of the cast. The whole movie was like this. Augie didn't come off as likable so I didn't care how he did in his role playing battle and Sweeney had so many stupid lines and was such an idiotically written character that I just wanted her to be off the screen as much as possible. I guess she's the antagonist but I'm not really even sure. I'm pretty sure Thompson was the only cool guy in the film and the only one I actually cared about.

Next, the comedy of the film. There were far too many jokes that relied on the gag of the role playing. Yeah, it's corny and weird, but the jokes revolving around it were usually just stupid. However, I will admit that the entire Kiss thing at the end was a very humorous touch. The comedy as a whole, though, hits its highpoint near the beginning - this is where I most frequently found myself laughing out loud. The latter third of the movie is essentially devoid of legitimate humor in my opinion (except the whole Kiss arrival) and really brings the film down.

Overall, I gave this film a 4/10. It really didn't do it for me. The humor just wasn't there and at many points I couldn't even find the humor that I wasn't appreciating.. The acting was also subpar and it was pretty forgettable. A big disappointment.