Dinner for Schmucks is a simple film. You’ve got Tim (Paul Rudd) wanting to move up in the ranks of his investment firm and willing to do anything to see that happen. When Tim impresses his boss by getting the foot of business in the door with a multi-billionaire client, he is invited to a special dinner to show his dedication to the company. The dinner involves each person bringing a ‘winner’ with them. The ‘winner’ tag is truly meant to say ‘idiot’. Whoever has the biggest idiot with them wins a trophy and Tim, if he wins, gets his big promotion. Regretfully, Tim finds his idiot and his idiot, Barry (Steve Carell), is a lot more trouble than he’s probably worth.
Dinner for Schmucks doesn’t really do anything new or special to set itself apart in a starving unique world of comedy. The back and forth between Carell and Rudd is fine, but the actual overall trip from the beginning of the film to the end is filled with unbalanced moments of seriousness mixed with spotty moments of comedy. For example, somewhere near the middle of the film you finally get what Barry is about and you feel horribly sorry for him. The comedy at this point is quite forced and sometimes completely absent. The film was written with the intentions of a comedy, but has moments like these that water down the comedy, so you don’t feel like laughing. It’s probably a lot darker than director Jay Roach intended and it’s tough to shake once it goes down that dark path. Known for such films as the Austin Powers trilogy and Mystery, Alaska, Roach has proven he can do both comedy and drama, but Dinner for Schmucks proves that he has some issues mixing the two.
Anyway, all of this aside, the film is goofy and the lead actors do their best to keep it all together. It certainly does have its moments, but those moments are simply created by Carell and Rudd and not by any writing that can sustain a certain flow to it.
As for the Blu-ray, it’s pretty. Paramount/Dreamworks Pictures did a great job with putting this one together, as the video is disturbing good at times. Seeing Zach Galifianakis’ face turn from white to red proves how pretty this Blu-ray can get. Seriously, I’m not joking. When you see Galifianakis have this one moment in the movie it will be more effective because it’s in HD. It sounds absolutely insane, but it’s true.
Equally as good on the Blu-ray is the audio, which comes at you in DTS-HD. This is one of those moments where the audio doesn’t really hurt/help the Blu-ray, but it does sound solid coming through any nice audio setup.
Shifting gears just slightly, the features on this disc are pretty solid. You get a nice behind the scenes featurette that gives you some insight about how the film was put together (and what the original intentions were). You get some decent deleted scenes, which don’t hurt or help. You get some really solid outtakes, as you’ll love Rudd and crews lightheartedness. You also get a very interesting feature on the mouse sets that were built. If you haven’t seen the movie then I won’t ruin what that means exactly. There are some more things, but these are probably the best parts of the features section of the Blu-ray.
