Role Models
Dir: David Wain
Rating: 2.5
Universal Pictures
99 Minutes
Paul Rudd seems affable- even when playing a sour, perpetually disgruntled energy drink pitchman, he’s goofy and winning. His latest film, Role Models, has all the earmarks of a tertiary-Apatow related project; frequent second stringer Rudd, supporting turns from a cadre of memorably minor comedy actors and a plot that manages to bridge vulgarity and sentimentality.
The plot’s pretty simple- grumpy guy hates his job, loses his girlfriend and is sentenced to mandatory Big Brothers-Big Sisters style mentorship program. Just as would happen in real life. It’s the minor elements that make the comedies of this ilk so endearing: Rudd and costar Seann William Scott’s casual trash talk in a middle school, the Society of Creative Anachronisms-aping LAIRE, the strange deluge of KISS adulation (key line: “I didn’t know Jews could sing like this!”). Role Models can’t aspire to quite the heights of Superbad or Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but that’s all right. Just like the main characters, it does the job half-assed but gets it done.
You can’t ask a film like this to make sense- for God’s sake, it has a truck decked out like a minotaur humping a statue of a horse at one point. But that’s not what it’s about- if you see a movie about nerds and losers learning to be happy with who they are, you can pretty much bet a couple of them are going to be hooking up with incongruously attractive women by the end. {Role Models} doesn’t disappoint, in large part because it’s not asking for all that much.
In particular, Scott (who has yet to pull himself out of the likable-douchebag trough he’s been digging since American Pie) manages surprising moments of sentimentality; maybe it’s the wide-eyed earnestness of his sleaze. His offhanded banter with Bobb’e J. Thompson (playing Ronnie, his thuggishly incorrigible ward) has true spontaneity and humor. Ronnie’s insistence on referring to Rudd as “Ben Affleck” (his explanation being if you’re white, then you’re Ben Affleck) and Scott’s affirmation that, indeed, Rudd is white is a particular highlight.
A movie like this feels like stop-gap. I doubt Role Models would be so widely distributed or hyped had it not been for the onslaught of filthy character comedies the last couple of years. The characters are thin, but they’re still likable. The cameos are predictable (the ever dependable Jane Lynch as a former coke-whore devoted to “servicing” the kids is one of her more memorable of many, many small roles), but still funny. Role Models is definitely a lightweight comedy, but with its own charms- if anything, it’s the little brother movie to those Apatow comedies and all the proudly vulgar rest.
