Customer Reviews

Dinner for Schmucks [DVD]

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

This film had me laughing out loud. Certain scenes were just genius! It is a fine example of taking an idea, pushing it to extremes and then taking even further!

The story is simple. Man wants promotion. Man gets chance of promotion and is invited to a special dinner with the boss where he has to impress - the catch is, that at this dinner you have to bring along an 'idiot' as entertainment.

Enter stage left Steve Carell, the walking disaster, who turns our Man's life (and everything else) upside down. Sounds rubbish, but it's totally hysterical.

The acting was by everyone was spot-on, with the supporting cast of nut-jobs putting in as great a performance and Steve Carell (who is of course excellent too) and the film's finalé was just hysterical.

The easily earns the title of "The Best Comedy I've Seen In A While" and I would happily watch it again. Laugh? I quite literally wet myself - but it's OK, it was with tears of laughter.

Jay Roach has done some quite enjoyable films, so, even though I really like the French original, I thought he would do a good job of producing an Americanized version of the Dinner. But no. The 'idiot' in the original is full of charm, an inadvertent wrecker, like Mr Bean. Steve Carell's 'schmuck', however, is charmless.

The pleasure in the French version is watching the uptight executive's life unravel as his calculating plans go awry. In this film the executive (Paul Rudd) has been scripted to be sympathetic so the function of the 'idiot' as an anti-bourgeois provocateur is lost. What is left is a dog's dinner.

Funny film if you've got a young sense of humour. Lots of laughs and jokes you'd want to see again

steve and paul have done it again!.. The third film they have worked together in, They play well off each other!!

A brilliant idea for a film...don't know why this film wasn't bigger than it has been...it's so cringeworthy but so funny...brilliant actors that just aren't right in the head!!!!!

I have Just watched Dinner for Schmucks and thought it was an all right film myself I gave it a 6 out of 10.

We bought this DVD as one of those 3 for £20 offers and it is the most unfunny pile of crap ever. The timing of the comedy is off and Steve Carell's character is the most annoying ever. Awful.

Without Steve Carell and Paul Rudd, it would be hard to understand how a film this terrible could make any money. It's hard to understand why Steve Carell took up this role, the film is essentially an absolutely done-to-death format that's somehow saccharine and tasteless simultaneously. There was one scene I found amusing. I could barely sit through the rest.

Dinner For Schmucks is a bit of a disappointment. It has a great cast and some very funny ideas but it gets lost somewhere along the way in its attempts to portray the characters as likeable. Both leads are very capable of being funny but because the filmmakers decided to make Paul Rudd's character likeable it means that Steve Carell's character becomes irritating because he's constantly scuppering the hopes of a genuinely nice guy. It also means that Rudd's character has no arc and no real lesson to learn. He starts off as a nice guy and carries on that way. It's not all bad though, there are some great belly laughs in this film. The blind guy is a hoot and the story is rich with great characters and cameos. It's definitely worth a watch but it really could have been so much better.

I can understand how movies like this polarise opinion when it comes to reviews because it really is a movie of two halves, trying to combine some amusing and emotive reflections with goofy cooky humour.

There are movies which do this well, mainly Wil Farrell movies like The Other Guys [DVD] [2011], this feature does not do it so well. So there are wonderful parts of this movie but they dont marry up well with others.

The movie's embattled protagonist is trying to get ahead in a corporate world which seems to be surviving by leeching of old money and populated by vicious, mean minded sorts. Promotion it appears has more to do with falling in with the corporate jocks traditional dinner at which they invite people they consider idiots. This leads to relationship difficulties for our hero when his partner considers it a mean spirited exercise, in some ways the star of the piece is the poor schmuck who gets invited to dinner when he accidentially (literally) encounters our hero.

The schmucks themselves are a band of misfits but they are all, relatively, with perhaps one exception, harmless and happy in their various states of being. This is were the movie fails for me and can only amout to a just OK rating. There's some heart felt, and still amusing, asides about how these individuals came to be how they are, particularly failed relationships and an odd mix of resignation and hopefulness. I would like to have seen that film but its continually interrupted by silly, for laughs, sketches, most of which feature an art photographer or an obsessive female stalker, which is a real shame because I didnt find those parts that funny.

There is a, not unpredictable, happily ever after storytelling element to this film and not that many surprises. More smiles than laugh out loud though.