Carell and one of his “mousterpieces.”

Dinner for Schmucks. Rated PG-13 for language including some sexual references, an intense accident scene and some sensuality.

Dinner for Schmucks is essentially a morality play with one simple moral: be tolerant of idiots. Ironically, the film itself is an exercise in that kind of tolerance. How much idiocy can you take before its not funny any more?  

From a distance, Schmucks seems to have all the right players to make a comedy juggernaut. Steve Carell, Zach Galifianakis, and Jermaine Clement (of Flight of the Conchords fame) throw their comedic chops into the mix, and Paul Rudd plays Tim, the straight man protagonist with a dry wit and newscaster delivery. Tim’s goals are familiar: get a promotion, marry his girlfriend. To accomplish his goals, he will do almost anything including committing to a dinner where every attendee must bring a guest with “extraordinary talents,” in other words, an idiot. The attendee with the most entertaining idiot wins the esteem of his fellows, and in Tim’s case, a sure promotion to an office on the hallowed seventh floor.

Enter Barry (Steve Carell), Tim’s idiot, a hopelessly naïve IRS agent whose passion is crafting dioramas around dead mice. As strange as it sounds, Barry’s hobby is really quite impressive—he recreates the Mona Lisa and many other famous works and dubs them his “mouse-sterpieces.” Unfortunately, his sympathetic traits end here. Carell’s character is pushy, unintentionally destructive, and more nagging than any two-year-old. He and several other supporting characters (including Tim’s dominatrix stalker) are shamelessly manipulated by the writers to create hoops and hurdles and impossibly awkward situations for Tim. They behave like killer robots programmed to destroy Tim’s life, not like human beings.

Much of what could have been funny in Dinner for Schmucks becomes obnoxious and silly, and the storyline eventually degenerates into an idiotic, slapstick climax and a rushed, sappy ending. This movie is all about packaging. It has all the right funny men on the cover, but trust me, what’s waiting inside is a big disappointment.