Dinner for Schmucks

Directed by Jay Roach

(PG-13)

**

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Dinner for Schmucks isn’t “a remake but a stupidization of a very good French farce,” said Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune. Francis Veber’s The Dinner Game was a smart, mean-spirited black comedy about businessmen who invite idiots to dinner and ridicule them for sport. The film was “dry yet sharp, skating a fine line between embracing the humiliation of its premise and exposing the cruelty of its proponents.” Jay Roach’s English-language adaptation softens the edges to keep from offending American audiences and winds up feeling slapstick and stagey. Paul Rudd plays an executive who can only win a promotion if he brings the biggest loser he can find (Steve Carell) to a dinner, said Genevieve Koski in the A.V. Club. Thanks to the actors’ “dependable likability,” Dinner for Schmucks has some appeal, even if its “laughs are more silly than scathing.” This is a rare film that’s actually “funnier than the trailers” suggest, said Ty Burr in The Boston Globe. Though the characters occasionally annoy, the film “suckers you into an agreeable state of idiot bliss” for its 114 minutes.