Softened, mushed-up remake of a rather distasteful French farce, called here The Dinner Game, concerning a clique of fat cats who periodically convene for a soirée to which each of them for their shared amusement brings along an unwitting idiot to compete for the laurel of biggest idiot. For the American mass market, the focal fat cat (Paul Rudd) has been made leaner and hungrier, a sympathetic, reluctant participant forced to jump through this hoop for job advancement. The focal idiot (Steve Carell) has meanwhile been so grotesqued — a buck-toothed, four-eyed dolt in a oversized hooded lavender nylon windbreaker, an IRS pencil pusher whose off-hours hobby is the construction of miniature tableaus with dead mice — that no idiots in the audience are at risk of identifying with him and taking offense, and yet he’s not so irredeemable an idiot that he cannot learn and teach important life lessons in the last act. Any sensitive viewer will be compelled to surrender his sense of moral or intellectual superiority by wanting fervently to kill the bumbling idiot for turning the fat cat’s life upside down in the twenty-four hours prior to the dinner, or else to kill the fat cat for enabling the idiot to do it. Like the French version, the film is quite nice-looking, but nowhere near as nice as the French. With Stephanie Szostak, Jemaine Clement, and Zach Galifianakis; directed by Jay Roach. (2010) — Duncan Shepherd
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