Movies for Schmucks?

This week’s film fare raises the age-old question “What’s worse, a bad romance or a bad comedy?” The two contenders are the Zac Efron melodrama CHARLIE ST. CLOUD and the Steve Carell vehicle DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS. The first wallows in cheap sentimentality, the second in uninspired slapstick.

Zac Efron plays Charlie St. Cloud, a high school graduate with a sailing scholarship to Stanford who puts his life on permanent hold when his little brother Sam dies in a car accident. He makes a deal with his dead brother to play catch with him in a forest glen near the cemetery every day at dusk … forever. Sacrificing his plans for college, Efron even takes a caretaker’s job at his brother’s cemetery. For five years, he faithfully keeps his promise – conversing with the ghost of his 11-year-old sibling as he throws the baseball back and forth, back and forth.

When Efron eventually falls for a girl named Tess, he suddenly finds himself emotionally torn. His otherworldly brother tearfully accuses him of breaking his promises while Tess pleads with him to move on with his life. Efron desperately and earnestly explains to Tess that the more time he spends in her world, the less time he has for Sam and he just can’t bear to do that. When Tess later is lost at sea, Efron’s crisis really comes to a head. What’s the poor boy to do?

This is some serious pablum. Incessantly buoyed by sappy violins and shot like a series of overwrought Thomas Kinkade paintings, CHARLIE ST. CLOUD is full of treacly messages about life, love and grief. Teenage girls will no doubt swoon with every frame of Efron’s “baby blues” but unless you like living life in the shallows, this greeting card of a movie is bereft of any real emotional resonance. The film frequently invokes St. Jude as the patron saint of lost causes. He should make this movie his next project.

St Jude should probably take a look at DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS as well. Based on the refreshingly mean-spirited French comedy THE DINNER GAME, the Americanized DINNER is not really mean-spirited and worse, barely registers as a comedy, since the laughs are few and far between.

The rather dark premise involves a dinner held regularly by a smug group of friends who set out to invite the most clueless idiots they can find. Following the dinner, the friends vote on which of the unsuspecting guests was the biggest loser. Paul Rudd plays a young executive who chooses to invite an extremely dense tax accountant who spends all his free time creating dioramas of dead mice dressed up in period clothes. Steve Carell, of course, is the nitwit. The tables get turned, however, as Carell unwittingly wreaks havoc in Rudd’s life.

Despite a cast that includes comic talents like Jemaine Clement and Zach Galifinakis in addition to Carell and Rudd, this movie is at least an hour old before anything very funny happens. The film’s mostly just a series of limp jokes and sloppy slapstick. An extended sequence with Rudd trying to get around with a bad back goes absolutely nowhere and when Carell joins in with a stalker girlfriend to trash Rudd’s apartment, it feels more desperate than humorous.

In the last line of the film, Carell says “The mind is a terrible thing.” Well, it’s certainly wasted in this movie.

But in the showdown between a lousy romance and a lame comedy, I think I have to side with comedy. No matter how bad a comedy, there’s almost always a least one of two good laughs amidst the proliferation of “bombs,” whereas a romantic misfire is usually a dud through and through. Case in point: in a restaurant scene in DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS, Carell tries to impress some important Swiss clients of Rudd’s by singing the praises of their country. “Oh, have you been to Switzerland?” they ask. Carell replies apologetically,” No, never. But I have a cousin who drives a Volvo.” The movie overall isn’t much, but that line is comedy gold. And there’s simply nothing equivalent to that in CHARLIE ST. CLOUD.