Dinner for Schmucks: Critic Reviews

A bland, summer-sloppy comedy that never risks actually swimming with schmucks and letting characters bruise themselves on outcroppings of mean fun.

In some ways an exemplary modern Hollywood comedy.

A buttock-clenchingly bad film.

Where the French leads were nasty, Steve Carell and Paul Rudd have an inherently likable quality even when playing a foolish sap and a cutthroat businessman.

Dinner for Schmucks may be as broad as the proverbial groaning board, but Rudd and Carell bring out its most toothsome delights.

A number of bits don't work, some of the characters wear out their welcome, but the whole suckers you into an agreeable state of idiot bliss.

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.

Despite its schticky title, the trick to Dinner for Schmucks isn't the schmucks, although director Jay Roach's funny comedy, adapted from a 1998 French film, makes sure every group of oddballs is represented.

The point of the movie is how miserable Tim's life is made by Barry, and audiences will know exactly how he feels.

It's lurching, desperate and borderline incomprehensible -- a movie whose characters act according to no known precept of recognizable human behavior.

The movie has a slew of goofball moments that don't add up to a consistently hilarious outing.

...it's hard not to think the portion offered here is just enough to satisfy anyone looking for a few laughs.

The genius of this version depends on the performance by Steve Carell, who plays Barry Speck as a man impervious to insult and utterly at peace with himself. He's truly a transcendent idiot.

I think I'll be in the minority on this one, but you know comedy: Nothing's more personal.

A perfect example of the modern comedy mill gone wrong, a prolonged muddle whose plot, specific situations, and improvised quips never line up.

Jay Roach has cast his picture with standout comic talents...

Dinner for Schmucks has everything that money can buy. That does not include comic inspiration, daring or velocity.

Pure, tasteless slapstick silliness with little on its mind beyond cheap yuks.

Steve Carell is the best comic actor working today.

An uproarious odd-couple remake of Francis Veber's hit French farce The Dinner Game.

Dinner With Schmucks may actually be the funniest movie currently in the marketplace -- but that's pretty much by default.

Like a four-star desert at the end of a hit-or-miss four-course meal, the finale is worth the wait.

In adapting Francis Veber's 1998 French farce Le Diner des cons (The Dinner Game), Roach and his writers David Guion and Michael Handelman have completely defanged it.

The same overall effect... could be achieved by intercutting Three Stooges shorts with YouTube videos of adorable kittens rolling around with baby bunnies...

'Dinner for Schmucks': Good Movie, Bad Title