There's a trick to playing a crude, lewd, obnoxious jerk and getting audiences to laugh at the spectacle of such loutishness. Alas, it's a trick that Simon Pegg and the folks behind How to Lose Your Friends and Alienate People fail, miserably, to pull off.
An embarassingly unfunny, stumblebum adaptation of Toby Young's memoir about a smug Brit who goes to work for Vanity Fair magazine in New York, director Robert Weide's clunky comedy presents Sidney Young (Pegg) as a boorish London muckraker hired on by Clayton Harding (Jeff Bridges) to bring a little U.K. impishness to the news/celebrity/high society rag called Sharps. Pegg's Young hasn't a clue, however, and before he's even started at the job, he has insulted and offended his higher-up, the bright, pretty Alison Olsen (Kirsten Dunst), also known as the movie's Love Interest.
