Dinner for schmucks

Every tribe has distinctive comic traditions, and the French have some of the cleverest. By comparison, Brits provide crude wit (pantomime, Carry On, Little Britain), Hollywood lowest-common-denominators (Apple Pie, Adam Sandler, Laurel and Hardy, TV sitcoms). Few had hopes when the piercing French satire, Le Diner de Cons (The Dinner Game), was remade. Its title was a warning: Dinner for Schmucks.

The Yiddish word upset some New Yorkers, some of whom preferred "schlemiels", while some saw racist usage and folks in the finance industry were upset personally. Others preferred the true translation of the original French, Dinner for Idiots (which is wording used in the Hollywood screenplay). Of such banality are movie PR campaigns made. Whatever, film buffs sneer, Hollywood simply distorted and trashed a truly comic concept.

That had been effectively simple: a group of snobs hold a monthly competitive dinner party to which each invites an idiot, a comically obsessive character. In the French story, a supposed simpleton surprises his host in deservedly unpleasant ways. In Hollywood, a total rewrite by David Guion and Michael Handelman kept the basic premise, adding situations and jokes they thought would lap up laughter in US cineplexes. The pair's only previous work was The Ex, a rom-com bomb in 2006 that also found feeble comedy in objectionable characters.

The producers (who included Sacha Baron Cohen) chose a suitably experienced director, Jay Roach, who'd co-created and -produced the Austin Powers farces and the Fockers franchise (directing its first). He was also a producer for a mixed bag of Hollywood comedies, including Cohen's Borat and Bruno, the Sandler/Barrymore 50 First Dates, the failed adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Diane Keaton's disastrous Smother. Running against form, he'd won Emmys, Globes and other awards for his direction of HBO's Recount (a well-acted docudrama on the 2000 US presidential election farrago in Florida).

In view of most of the preceding paragraph, it's remarkable that the French film's veteran director, Francis Veber, signed up as an executive producer for the remake. He'd co-written the screenplay adaptation of La Cage aux Folles (1978), wrote and directed Les Fugitifs (1986), adapted My Father the Hero (1994), wrote Le Placard (the 2001 gay rights satire starring Depardieu, also directed by Veber), and another three dozen features. Veber specialises in slapstick with wit, which the Schmucks' script didn't have.

The film relied instead on Paul (Sisters, Friends) Rudd and Steve (SNL) Carrell as its comic leads, playing the hot-shot company executive whose winning guest is an obsessive creator of dioramas showcasing suitably dressed dead mice. The two so-so comic talents had worked together previously on Anchorman and The Thirty-Year-Old Virgin.

The project's $69 million budget squeezed in a handful of other comic faces to be supposedly supportive actors, all of whom read out their cliched cringe-worthy dialogue with forgiveably blank expressions: Zach Galifianakis (beard, currently Hollywood's least funny comic star), the UK's David Walliams (Little Britain, strutting Germanically) and Lucy Punch (as a long-legged vamp again, much better when directed by Woody Allen). Kiwi Jemaine (Flight of the Conchords co-creator/star) Clement, playing an eccentric commercial artist, to counterpoint Carrell's character. Many other known faces appear, for a total terrible waste of small talents.

This is one of the least enjoyable, least funny products to creak off Hollywood's assembly belts in 2010. The lumbering movie is surely a certified loss-maker for Dreamworks and its other producers, meaning, all gods willing, that it will not spawn a sequel. One factor keeping it off the worst rating level were the artists who crafted the mice tableaux: they are cute, with some wit.