Dinner for Schmucks (2010)

When he finds out that his work superiors host a dinner celebrating the idiocy of their guests, a rising executive questions it when he's invited, just as he befriends a man who would be the perfect guest.

Director:

Jay Roach

Writers:

David Guion (screenplay), Michael Handelman (screenplay),

Stars:

Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, Zach Galifianakis

1 nomination.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Steve Carell	...	Barry
Paul Rudd	...	Tim
Zach Galifianakis	...	Therman
Jemaine Clement	...	Kieran
Stephanie Szostak	...	Julie
Lucy Punch	...	Darla
Bruce Greenwood	...	Lance Fender
David Walliams	...	Müeller
Ron Livingston	...	Caldwell
Larry Wilmore	...	Williams
Kristen Schaal	...	Susana
P.J. Byrne	...	Davenport
Andrea Savage	...	Robin
Nick Kroll	...	Josh
Randall Park	...	Henderson

Storyline

Tim (Rudd) is a rising executive who "succeeds" in finding the perfect guest, IRS employee Barry (Carell), for his boss's monthly event, a so-called "dinner for idiots," which offers certain advantages to the exec who shows up with the biggest buffoon.

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Plot Keywords:

dinner | irs | idiot | hairy chest | married to an inanimate object | 

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Taglines:

Takes One To Know One.

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Genres:

Comedy

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Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)

Rated PG-13 for sequences of crude and sexual content, some partial nudity and language

Details

Official Sites:

Official site

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

30 July 2010 (USA)

Also Known As:

The Dinner

Filming Locations:

102 Pine Avenue, Long Beach, California, USA

Box Office

Opening Weekend:

£940,586 (UK) (3 September 2010)

Gross:

$72,980,108 (USA) (8 October 2010)

Company Credits

Production Co:

Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks SKG, Spyglass Entertainment

Technical Specs

Runtime:

114 min

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital DTS (as dts) SDDS

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

In one of the mice dioramas, a bottle of Dom Perignon is called "Veber". Francis Veber wrote and directed The Dinner Game, the film which inspired this remake.

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Goofs

When Barry is working on his mice near the end of the film, he takes off his glasses to put on the magnifying "helmet". When he raises the magnifying part, he is wearing his glasses again.

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Quotes

Tim: Any one of you would throw me under the bus for a bigger bonus, but Barry would throw himself under a car to protect a mouse... that was already dead.

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Crazy Credits

After the credits, A diorama is displayed of a stuffed mouse sitting in a burnt down house, with Barry heard laughing as he reveals that Fender's company has gone bust with Forbes Magazine naming him the "World's Biggest Loser."

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Connections

Featured in The Rotten Tomatoes Show: Dinner for Schmucks/Charlie St. Cloud/Get Low (2010)

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Soundtracks

"The Fool on the Hill"
(1967)
Written by John Lennon & Paul McCartney
Performed by The Beatles
Courtesy of Capitol Records LLC
Under license from EMI Film & Television Music

User Reviews

Dinner sucks

In order to impress his girlfriend, Tim (Paul Rudd) needs to secure a promotion. So he decides to accept his bosses challenge; bring an 'idiot' to their annual 'Dinner for Winners'. A competition run by white-collar executives and disguised as a celebration of brilliance in unrecognised individuals. In reality, the meal is simply an opportunity for elitist senior-management types to laugh at some quirky and eccentric members of society. Tim's girlfriend tries to convince him the whole idea is abhorrent. Just as he is beginning to agree with her, he meets Barry (Steve Carell). An IRS worker, with a passion for creating art from taxidermied mice, Barry might just be the perfect man to help Tim win the competition.

The US version of The Office has shown us that Carell can do awkward better than most and Anchorman proved his capabilities of making stupidity funny. However, his character here is completely unlikeable and, more often than not, irritating. His bowl haircut, glasses and protruding teeth, evoke bad seventies sitcoms. A time when this look would have been a stylists shorthand for 'socially inept'. Paul Rudd, on the other hand, is given little opportunity to make us laugh, playing two-dimensional straight man, Tim. Director Jay Roach's previous franchises (Austin Powers, Meet the Parents/Fockers) may not have been the greatest comedies of the past fifteen years, but delivered as and when expected. The problems with Dinner for Schmucks lie in the pacing and the writing. With a 114 minute runtime, it is simply too long. Entire characters and subplots are superfluous. It also suffers badly from second-act-drag, believing that given enough on-screen time we will somehow empathise with our two leads.

Producer Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat, Bruno), seems to have called in a number of favours from celebrity friends and cast them in every available role. The idea, presumably, is that good performances can boost a weak script into something amusing. Of Course, this is not the case. Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords) as avant-garde artiste, Kieran, makes the most of his characters nonsequiturs but only manages to raise a smirk at best. The same cannot be said for David Walliams (Little Britain), whose Swiss, aristocratic character, Mueller, is completely redundant in every way. The only worthy gag in almost two-hours is provided by Chris O' Dowd (The I.T. Crowd) as a blind swordsman. However having only a handful of lines and appearing twenty minutes before the credits roll, its far too little, far too late.

Dinner for Schmucks starts with a premise full of comedic opportunities, but spends the next hour and a half ignoring these. The original, a French film from 1998 entitled The Dinner Game, was a social satire focusing on the ridiculous measures the aristocracy will go to amuse themselves. It was full of witty dialogue and, at 80 minutes long, it worked. As often happens, Hollywood seems to have missed the point and delivered a broad and bland remake.