Not fool's gold: Only straight-man Paul Rudd can salvage 'Dinner for Schmucks'

Something's wrong when dead rodents generate a film's biggest laughs.

In Jay Roach's "Dinner for Schmucks," Steve Carell plays Barry, a lonely Internal Revenue Service dweeb whose passion is stuffing dead mice and dressing them in tiny costumes.

He might come up with a rodent Ben Franklin in Colonial garb flying a kite in a lightning storm or a "Last Supper" of mice in tiny sandals and beards.

Barry is a blithering fool and thus a godsend for scrambling young executive Tim (Paul Rudd).

Tim's sneering CEO (Bruce Greenwood) hosts a dinner to which his most promising employees are told to bring the biggest idiot they can find. Prizes will be given; careers launched.

Pushing aside the inner nag that tells him this is a really cruel idea, the ambitious Tim gloms onto Barry like a treasure hunter to a pirate map. Problem is, once taken under Tim's wing, Barry cannot be shaken loose.

Delighted to at long last have a friend, Barry takes over. Before long Barry drives away Tim's fiancee, Julie (Stephanie Szostak), and reintroduces Tim to a crazed stalker (Lucy Punch) with whom he had an ill-fated one-night stand.

There are other complications - a preening photographer (Jemaine Clement of "Flight of the Conchords") is sniffing around the estranged Julie. And then there's Barry's tortured relationship with his IRS boss, an egocentric creep (Zach Galifianakis) who believes he has mind-control powers.

Inspired by the French farce "The Dinner Game," "Schmucks" is lightweight and way too predictable. It goes without saying that Tim will find himself changed for the better by Barry's selfless devotion.

Plus, "Dinner for Schmucks" has pacing problems. It starts out OK and ends fairly well with the chaotic dinner, but there's a big, flat central section that feels like we're just treading water.

While Carell's maddeningly dense Barry is the film's comedic core, the film works mostly because of Rudd, who resists the temptation to go toe-to-toe for laughs and instead concentrates on establishing Tim as a plausible individual. His non-showy performance grounds the film in an emotional reality. It's that rare case where the straight man saves the day.

But the real heroes of "Dinner for Schmucks" are the production artists who came up with Barry's mouse dioramas, which are both hysterically funny and artistically valid. They're so good, in fact, that they work against the film's premise - no true idiot could have come up with ideas so clever, funny and thoroughly enjoyable.

Produced by Laurie MacDonald, Walter F. Parkes and Jay Roach, directed by Jay Roach, written by David Guion and Michael Handelman, based on the French movie "Le Diner de Cons" by Francis Veber, music by Theodore Shapiro, distributed by Paramount.