Dinner for Schmucks

Steve Carell's comedy stock-price takes a terrible knock with this buttock-clenchingly bad film, a deeply unfunny pseudo-French farce and a remake of Francis Veber's 1998 black comedy Le Dîner de Cons, or The Dinner Game. That was about a sadistic parlour game practised by a group of sneery metropolitan sophisticates. Each would invite the biggest idiot he could find to a regular formal dinner; the dopes would be mocked behind their back and a prize (secretly) awarded to the most egregious loser. I remember very much enjoying the original, but maybe distance now lends something other than enchantment to the view. Perhaps Veber's original has been trashed – or perhaps this crass movie has, disturbingly, located something crass in the source material itself. Paul Rudd plays a basically decent guy who finds himself dragged into this "game" to please the boss: the idiot he finds is a sad sack who stuffs and dresses up dead mice in cute costumes. He is played, with worrying lack of fun, by Carell. Our own David Walliams has a gag-free cameo as a Swiss financier. This is one for everyone to omit from their CV.