Film

How much are you willing to suffer for a Paul Rudd fix? Blessed with a sense of comic timing that would impress Jack Benny, Rudd can turn the most innocuous line into a straight-faced zinger. The fact that the actor flits among a number of comedy posses—he’s a card-carrying member of Will Ferrell’s Frat Pack, Judd Apatow’s manchild stable and director David Wain’s The State/Stella gang—means you get ample opportunities to see him perfecting the art of second-banana wisecracking. Whether all of these yukfests are worth sitting through simply for Rudd’s jabs, however, is a different story, and Wain’s movie about two immature knuckleheads (Rudd, Scott) forced to mentor troubled youth is a serious tolerance test.

Remove the joy of hearing the actor goof about coffee-cup sizes and Kiss songs (“I like to rock & roll part of every day; I usually have errands”) with Zen smarminess, and what do you have? The equally talented Elizabeth Banks wasted in a stock girlfriend role, Scott doing his usual clueless jack-off bit (someone needs to tell him that the alpha-jerk shtick is wearing thin), a heavy reliance on kids saying the darnedest vulgarities, and the mocking of LARP (live-action role-playing) fanatics—the cinematic equivalent of shooting a hatchery in a barrel.