Role Model apes Judd Apatow's men-in-crisis formula. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

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Role Model apes Judd Apatow's men-in-crisis formula. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

By Peter Suderman, &#160November 6, 2008

What hath Judd Apatow wrought? It's been three years since The 40 Year Old Virgin proved the sensitive sex-romp formula could win big with both critics and moviegoers. Since then, the comedic tides have turned in favor of Apatowesque heroes: seriously scatological sad-sacks trying to deal with the responsibilities of post-adolescence. In just a few short years, Apatow and his ever expanding crew of director and actor buddies have built a comedy empire on the strength of lovelorn lads chasing beauties while creatively combining four-letter words.

Meanwhile, the movie industry's taken notice: These days, it seems as if every Hollywood comedy that doesn't come sealed with the official Apatow brand is a knock-off. For those in the multiplexes, it's all starting to blend together. Last week saw Kevin Smith's Zack and Miri Make a Porno, starring Apatow-regular Seth Rogen as a crass, cynical guy in his late 20s trying to repair a relationship with a sexy, fun blonde played by Elizabeth Banks. This week we've got Role Models, featuring Apatow-regular Paul Rudd as a crass, cynical guy in his mid 30s trying to repair a relationship with a sexy, fun blonde played by Elizabeth Banks.

It's enough to make you wonder: Are all these films starting to resemble Rudd's firmly Apatowian character, Danny Donahue, a tie-yoked young professional who spends his days promoting a ghastly energy drink to school kids, when he grumbles, "I'm in a rut. I'm 35 years old. I figured I'd be something!" Or, to put it another way: Are male life-crisis comedies having a crisis of their own?

Maybe, but if this is a rut, it's not necessarily one that anyone needs to get out of just yet. Sure, the story outlines are familiar: Like Zack and Miri, Role Models is predictable in both its pathos and its profanity. Role Models, though, is zanier, wackier, more unpredictable. Miri went slightly further with its obscenity (just barely), but Role Models goes further with everything else. Yes, it's a comedy about dopey dudes learning to grow up, and it shares the crude, juvenile obsessions of its genre counterparts: weed, booze, drugs, babes, and endless debates about pop culture. But it's also a about energy drinks, Big Brother organizations, bad office parties, fantasy role playing games, and, uh, KISS. It's obscene, misanthropic, cynical -- and pretty funny.

Funny, and willfully absurd. The story -- if you can call it that -- is just a setup for shenanigans: Danny and his free-living, sex-obsessed coworker Wheeler (Sean William Scott) travel from school to school trying to convince kids to drink Minotaur, a brain-frazzling energy drink, rather than do drugs. But after Donahue's girlfriend Beth (Banks) dumps him for being too cynical, they go on a caffeinated bender, wreck their Minotaur-mobile, and find themselves sentences to a month of community service as mentors in a big brother program called Sturdy Wings.

Wheeler gets paired with a smack-talking child-terror named Ronnie (Bobb'e J. Thompson), while Danny ends up with with Augie (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), a cape-wearing teenage super dork. Is the premise nutty? No doubt, but the spectacle of silliness that results makes it all worth it. There are plenty of good gags -- the Minotaur-mobile crash is a mini-epic, and the sight of the fantasy game's king conferring with his advisers in a burger joint is all sorts of loopy -- but even more than that, Role Models is a safari into the wilds of human weirdness.

The movie plays like a 100 minute long excuse for director and co-writer David Wain to indulge his obsession with oddballs. There's A.D. Miles as a guitar-strumming Sturdy Wings goof, Ken Jeong as the fantasy game's King Argotron, and Ken Marino as Augie's beefy, befuddled stepdad. All come fully steeped in quirk. But oddest among them is Gayle Sweeny (Jane Lynch), director of Sturdy Wings. She has maybe 20 minutes of screen time, but her comic rhythms are so sharp, it seems like she's leading Rudd and Scott along, not the other way around.

Rudd, of course, plays it semi-straight, but even he's got more to him than the soulless mopes you usually find in romantic leads. To his credit, he never gets too gooey. Realizing how much he loves his girl (as the genre's rules require), he simply asks, "Where am I gonna find a girl who hates all the same things I do?" As the girl in question, the sensible, beautiful babe whose affection is the movie's McGuffin, Banks probably has the most thankless role, but she's plucky and pretty enough that it hardly matters. And anyway, Augie is Danny's real partner. Mintz-Plasse makes him a loser among dweebs, and his super-charged shyness plays well with Danny's inhibitions.

Self-repression, of course, is not a problem for Wheeler, though self-awareness is. When it comes to playing dumb, Scott's a natural. His Wheeler isn't a total brain-drain, but he's definitely a lightweight. What makes him so charming, though, is his total investment in, well, everything. He's a stubble-covered babe-hound, a KISS obsessive, a chipper, charming, party-boy maniac. The character might've been just another winking quipper, but Scott gives the role an animalistic charge; it's all instinct. Wheeler's job involves wearing a furry minotaur costume -- "It's easy to do while hung over," he cheerfully explains -- but the real beast is underneath.

That makes him a perfect match for his young ward, Ronnie, a kid who rattles off did-he-just-say-that? lines like a speed-rapper. He just wants to shock, whether or not any of it's believable. It isn't, but no matter. Thompson's a foul-mouthed 20-something comic stuck in the body of a 12 year old, which is what makes the performance so remarkable. Here's a kid with a long future as a professional F-bomb dropper.

Like Ronnie, much of the movie is over-the-top, and the swords-and-weirdos finale seems slightly too enthralled by its own strangeness. But celebrating nonconformism -- even in the form of prepackaged Hollywood idiosyncracies -- is endearing enough to excuse this. And it's almost enough to make you forget that, like most of its fellow men-in-crisis movies, Role Models never really resolves its male characters' central existential crises. Instead, it offers up distraction: do something wild, go a little crazy, tell some jokes, and get the girl. Be stupid, be cranky, be goofy, be yourself. Or, as Danny tells Augie: "Do what makes you happy." Role Models offers no innovations on its chosen genre, and it lacks the emotional depth and complexity of Apatow's best work. In other words, it goes nowhere, but it's frivolous, fun, and funny anyway. You can never accuse it of not taking its own advice.

Peter Suderman is Culture11's arts editor.