Role Models: Critic Reviews

The fun of Role Models is that it's a high-concept movie executed with speed and finesse and the kind of brusquely tossed-off obscene banter that can get you laughing before you know what hit you.

Role Models pours sugar and cream on everything and turns it to mush.

Role Models is exuberantly staged, fitfully funny and boasts a glorious supporting turn from Jane Lynch as the demagogic onetime addict.

Role Models is a rare mainstream buddy comedy that deftly blends the endearing and the vulgar and intersperses raucous humor with subtle wit.

You can probably figure out how this is all going to end, but it still has more laughs than you might think.

Role Models plays well within the Judd Apatow playpen, but its shaggy-dog dyspepsia renders it both less commercial and a little more dangerous, and Rudd is why. He's W.C. Fields trapped in the body of Cary Grant.

Paul Rudd wears the constant look of glazed-eye amusement; everything seems to tickle him, even that which annoys or frustrates or disappoints him.

Like its main characters, the movie is simply stuck on stupid.

Something bizarre starts to happen around the halfway mark, perhaps because no one knew how to develop the original premise.

Role Models crosses plenty of familiar territory, but Wain and his merry band of mischief-makers offer a likeable, laughable mix of testosterone and heart.

Filth and sentimentality -- the yin- yang combo of current guy comedy -- entwine in Role Models with the naughty bits overpowering the funny.

Role Models is the kind of movie you don't see every day, a comedy that is funny.

Role Models wobbles like crazy en route to a surprisingly strong finish.

The general tone is one of crusty, unapologetic misanthropy, driven home by the formidable Rudd (who also kicked in on the script).

It's pretty formulaic stuff, and earns its R rating with profanity and unapologetically gratuitous female nudity, but somehow has a winning knuckleheaded charm.

Although it delivers a consistent dose of chuckles, you can't help but wonder if Role Models falls short of its potential.

A riotous comedy from director David Wain.

Role Models deals in the kind of overgrown frat-boy humor that is sometimes funny, sometimes stupid. Here, it is pretty evenly split between the two camps, though stupid may have a slight edge.

If the material has a formulaic feel and the dialogue often skews more rude than clever, Role Models nonetheless amuses throughout. That's in large part due to the stars, whose roles very much play to their familiar comic strengths.

You stand a fair chance of emerging from the movie with your lack of faith in humanity unchallenged.

As funny as some bits are, the best you can say about Role Models is that it's imitation Apatow. It lacks the master's crude touch.

There are three things that every modern screen comedy needs: references to old KISS songs, guys dressed as knights whacking each other with foam swords, and a potty-mouthed 10-year-old.

Role Models could have been another formulaic comedy, fresh off the assembly line. Instead, the work of Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott here is worthy of praise and one of the funnier films this year.

At times, there's a sense the writers are trying to shoehorn sexual crudity into the plot to hit the young male market, but that feels uncomfortably out of place in a movie about helping children.

The equivalent of trying to sneak an issue of Newsweek into the house, rolled up inside a copy of Mad magazine.