Role Models
November. 07,2008 RTwo salesmen trash a company truck on an energy drink-fueled bender. Upon their arrest, the court gives them a choice: do hard time or spend 150 service hours with a mentorship program. After one day with the kids, however, jail doesn't look half bad.
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Reviews
Crappy film
It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.
what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.
It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.
Danny (Paul Rudd) and Anson (Seann William Scott) are energy drink promoters, a bit like Red Bull but this stuff makes your urine go green. When Danny's girlfriend breaks up with him he gets into a fight with a tow truck driver after a drinks promotion at a school and both end up getting community service.They enrol in a program run by Gayle (Jane Lynch) an ex drug addict where they are mentors to younger kids. Danny gets Augie (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) who is heavily into dungeons and dragons type role playing. Danny gets a foul mouthed young black kid called Ronnie. Both initially do their community service to count down their hours but realise they need to do more to help these kids and bond with them.Role Models has six credited writers and yet manage to make a forgettable film. It was not until Ken Jeong showed up playing the king in the medieval role playing segment that I realised I had seen this film before!It is an uneasy mixture of bawdy, crude with cloying sentimentality of letting kids be themselves and not let parents mess them up. This might be true for Augie whose mum just wants him to be normal and be out of her way so she can be with her boyfriend. However I cannot buy that Ronnie is so foul mouthed and annoying because his father left him when he was young. We see his mum as loving and supportive.As for the main characters they play the type they have played before. Scott is a variation of Stifler, Rudd is the rather bland sarcastic type, his girlfriend seems to have dumped him because he is not boring enough. Only Jane Lynch gets the best lines as the ex crackhead. The final role playing battle where our main characters come in dressed as members of the rock group Kiss is fun.
There are much more sexy women than in most comedies, except the ones that are dealing with dating/chasing such women. What's more, they are well placed, as such things go, they don't seem to be "just for show".Also, the main characters do their usual funny stuff and it works more-or-less OK.But, the main point, interacting with kids, didn't work out so well. It's OK, nothing really wrong with it, but, there's more fun to be had with this setup.Most jokes in the movie seem to come from sexual allusions. First, it's way too much and second, it's not a good fit for a movie with kids.Also, the script has several issues. I mean, really, if you have to explicitly say that Elizabeth Banks is both beautiful and smart, there's something wrong with the script. Just a few well placed scenes (say, in the court, since she's a lawyer) would have shown that.As modern comedies go, it's OK, but, nothing special.
"Role Models" is from a time long ago in a galaxy far away where Seann William Scott had equal billing and stature with Paul Rudd and both could be ably supported by lesser knowns like Elizabeth Banks, Jane Lynch, and Ken Jeong (in short, well before "Ant-Man," "Pitch Perfect," "Glee," and "The Hangover"). The best feature of this amiable comedy is the cast, who spin silver if not gold from a formulaic story, pour on the charm without getting smarmy about it, and inject just the right amount of cynicism that keeps the humor sharp without being unnecessarily mean. This movie skillfully sails right over the many pits into which it could have fallen. The set- pieces sometimes seem a little random and meandering, but none of it is boring. Scott (who, I confess, I've always thought is an underrated comedic actor who never got the break he deserved) and Rudd (whose skills are more widely recognized) pair nicely together and pull off the "friends-but-not-really" dynamic extremely well. Their relationship is perhaps the most unique thing here -- it's a buddy comedy featuring two guys who are barely buddies, don't have much in common, yet have developed a long-standing mutual tolerance for each other's foibles. That's not an easy dynamic to convey in a lighthearted, lightly raunchy comedy that also has to pack in sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll, which it does seamlessly. Any movie that successfully merges LARPing and KISS can't be all bad.
Anson Wheeler (Seann William Scott) and Danny Donahue (Paul Rudd) are traveling promoters for an energy drink company. Wheeler is a slacker womanizer. Danny is devoted to lawyer Beth (Elizabeth Banks) and bitter that his life is going nowhere. In desperation, he asks her to marry him. Of course, she breaks up with him. Danny gets into a fight with a tow truck driver causing damage to the school. Beth gets them community service and they become big brothers to Augie (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) who's obsessed with Live-Action-Interactive-Role playing-Explorers (basically LARP) and foul-mouthed Ronnie (Bobb'e J. Thompson). Gayle Sweeny (Jane Lynch) runs the program.Paul Rudd is a great grump and gets in some good rants. Seann William Scott is doing his usual womanizing slacker. Mintz-Plasse is touching as the LARP nerd. He has a sweet relationship with Rudd. There is something funny about a foul-mouthed little kid. There are a lot of inappropriate laughs and there's a sweet feel-good movie at its center.