Dinner for Schmucks (2010)
★★★ — Dinner for Schmucks (2010)
Dinner for Schmucks arrived in the summer of 2010 as a Hollywood remake of Francis Veber's 1998 French farce Le Dîner de Cons, a film that had already proven itself a reliable crowd-pleaser in its home country. The premise is a gift for a certain kind of broad comedy: a corporate climber, played by Paul Rudd, discovers he can fast-track his career by attending his boss's cruel dinner party, where the real competition is to bring along the most hapless, oblivious guest imaginable. Naturally, fate drops exactly that person into his path. The setup is clean, the comic possibilities are obvious, and the film wastes little time establishing what kind of ride it intends to be. Whether that ride is worth taking is, of course, another matter entirely.
The film was directed by Jay Roach, a filmmaker with a well-worn track record in mainstream Hollywood comedy. Roach had already demonstrated a knack for pairing mismatched personalities and letting the friction do the work, as you can see in his earlier efforts reviewed on this site: Meet the Parents and its sequel Meet the Fockers. Those films leaned on a similar formula of mounting social catastrophe and escalating embarrassment, and Dinner for Schmucks sits comfortably in that same tradition, for better or worse. Produced through Everyman Pictures and Parkes+MacDonald Production and running to a somewhat generous 114 minutes, the film is a polished but unremarkable studio product, the sort of thing assembled by people who know exactly what they are doing and are doing it without any particular desire to surprise you.
The cast is the strongest argument for giving the film your time. Paul Rudd, in a role not entirely unlike the straight-man positions he has occupied elsewhere (his work in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and Knocked Up being good reference points on this site), provides an affable, grounded centre around which the chaos can spin. Steve Carell, however, is the engine here, playing Barry as a man whose cheerful incompetence and elaborately crafted dioramas made from taxidermied mice represent something simultaneously ridiculous and oddly touching. The supporting cast adds further texture: Jemaine Clement as an absurdly self-important artist, Zach Galifianakis in full eccentric mode, and Stephanie Szostak as the fiancée whose patience is tested by the whole sorry business. It is, on paper, a well-assembled group of comic performers given a reasonably solid premise to work with.
Dinner with Schmucks (2010) is exactly what you’d expect from a Hollywood studio comedy: formulaic, over-the-top, and packed with the kind of broad, slapstick humor that either lands or falls flat depending on your mood. Loosely based on the French film *Le Dîner de Cons*, it follows ambitious exec Tim (Paul Rudd) as he’s forced to bring an eccentric “idiot” (Steve Carell’s Barry) to his boss’s annual dinner where guests showcase their weirdest acquaintances. What follows is a series of increasingly absurd set pieces, bizarre taxidermy displays, and painfully awkward social encounters. And yet (against all odds) it’s at times genuinely funny. The first scene where Barry meets Therman, is hilarious. That said, the story drags badly in the second act, overstuffed with subplots and repetitive gags. At nearly two hours, it’s at least 30 minutes too long, and the emotional beats feel tacked on rather than earned. Still, it’s slightly better than average for this genre, thanks almost entirely to Carell’s fearless performance and a few inspired moments of surreal comedy. Silly, uneven, and forgettable in parts, but with enough laughs to justify the watch. Not high art, but sometimes, you just need turn your brain off cinema.
I think that is about the right way to land on this one. Carell really is doing something committed and peculiar with Barry, and there are moments where the film earns genuine laughter precisely because he refuses to play it safe. But the bloat is real, and no amount of goodwill towards the cast quite compensates for a second act that feels as though it was edited by someone who could not bear to cut anything. For me, Roach has made tighter, more focused comedies, and this one suffers from the sense that everyone involved was confident enough in the material to let it run long. Worth a watch on a quiet evening, perhaps, but probably not something you will find yourself reaching for twice.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2010 | Watched: 2026-02-17
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Dinner for Schmucks (2010) on YouTube
Where to watch
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Jay Roach: Meet the Fockers (2004) · Meet the Parents (2000)
More with Paul Rudd: Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Knocked Up (2007)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
