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80It's outstanding work (Carell). It's also a really funny movie.
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80The film collects a cast of performers who know how to be funny. The success of this movie, following a formula upheld by just about any recent hit comedy you can name, lies as much with supporting players and plot-derailing set pieces as with the central story and characters.
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80An uproarious odd-couple remake of Francis Veber's hit French farce "The Dinner Game."
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75The guests at the dinner are a strange lot. To describe them would be to give away their jokes, and one of the pleasures of the movie is having each one appear.
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75Dinner for Schmucks goes up in flames. Amusingly, perhaps -- but creatively, too.
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75Dinner for Schmucks is lumbering, inconsistent and about 20 minutes too long, but it's funny. It's funny from the beginning, and it stays funny, even as it beats scenes to death and overstays its welcome.
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75Gussied-up rodents and inane male antics come together in funny and inspired ways in this screwball farce.
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75The situations are painstakingly set up and downright painful to sit through. So enjoy, or endure the appetizers, because with this Dinner, dessert is truly the topper.
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70Though Carell and Rudd are both saddled with characters that just aren't as interesting as many they've played in the past, the movie benefits from having drawn many gifted comedians to supporting roles.
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70While the climactic dinner is a bit too much like a circus audition, Roach -- who helmed the "Austin Powers" movies as well as "Meet the Parents" and "Meet the Fockers" -- knows how to enjoy each sideshow.
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70Carell's performance as Barry, is nothing short of magnificent.
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70On the way to this predictable conclusion, the movie offers plenty of smart entertainment. You'd be a schmuck to miss it.
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67Steve Carell's character in Dinner for Schmucks is almost too pitiful for the jokes launched against him to be funny. It is a terrific performance making everyone else's condescension sound harsher than the writers likely intended.
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Thanks to Rudd and Carell's dependable likeability and a tacked-on warm-and-fuzzy ending, Dinner For Schmucks is leagues ahead of its forebear in terms of mass appeal, but its laughs are more silly than scathing.
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65The problem isn't just that the gags feel airless and pointless; it's that the performers - many of whom have done wonderful work in other settings - seem more bent on pleasing each other than on entertaining us.
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63When Hollywood decides to remake French farce by Francis Veber, the result can be a champagne cocktail (La Cage Aux Folles spawning The Birdcage) or pâté de merde (Les Compères degenerating into Father's Day). Dinner for Schmucks, adapted from Veber's Le Dîner De Cons, falls somewhere in the middle.
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63Dinner for Schmucks has already raised hackles in the Yiddish-speaking community for the breathtakingly offensive epithet in its title (and it's not "dinner"). But it turns out that this comedy of humiliation, starring Paul Rudd and Steve Carell, isn't nearly as off-putting as it might have been.
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63Far from a classic of precision farce, but it's funnier than the trailers make it seem.
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63The film is sporadically amusing but gives the impression it should be generating more laughs than it does.
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63It's probably best not to think very hard about any of it -- just dummy up and laugh along.
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60In sum, the film is not without its sweetness. Carell's Barry retells the story of his life in dioramas populated completely with costumed, stuffed mice.
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50The hands-down funniest elements in Dinner for Schmucks turn out to be the mice dioramas, which become increasingly clever - even touching - as the film unfolds, then laugh-out-loud hilarious over the end credits. But you know you're in trouble when the best thing in your movie is a bunch of dead rodents.
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50It's suprisingly flat.
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50There's plenty here to keep summer comedy fans satiated, if not entirely satisfied.
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50Its mean-spiritedness, stupidity and squandering of talent is uniquely Hollywood.
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50No schmucks were harmed in the making of Dinner for Schmucks. That's the problem.
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50With Paul Rudd as the would-be mocker and Steve Carell as the mockee, and all manner of new supporting characters and plot lines thrown in, and much less energy, delight, wit, humor and fun than the original was able to muster without any evident strain. There's the occasional bubble, I confess, but almost no delight.
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Paramount Pictures and director Jay Roach would like to invite you to a dinner they're hosting, at which you are welcome to laugh at these poor jerks. That's a little messed up.
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50This tawdry freak show is a telling substitution for the actual stupidity mocked in Veber's original. Roach's remake manages both mean-spiritedness and timidity the same time. That's some feat-moviemaking for boneheads.
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42The characters who come off best in Dinner for Schmucks are those dead mice.
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40Hardly a classic given the talents of Carell, Rudd and Roach at his best. It bungles utilising plenty of talent in a lightweight comedy effort that brings little fresh to the table.
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The Americanized version reconfigures the plot as both a hazing ritual for corporate-ladder-climbers and a lazy hook to hang cheap jokes on.
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40There are inspired gags, to be sure, but they're few and far between.
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40Against all reason and expectation, the result is a distinctly unfunny film.
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40A perfect example of the modern comedy mill gone wrong, a prolonged muddle whose plot, specific situations, and improvised quips never line up.
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38A remake for schlemiels, or at least easy marks when it comes to formulaic Hollywood comedy. But the film's peculiar sluggishness and nagging hypocrisy probably won't get in the way of its popularity.
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30Pathetically unfunny most of the time.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 48 out of 81
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Mixed: 12 out of 81
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Negative: 21 out of 81
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