Role Models

Most days, I wake up feeling like Danny Donahue (Paul Rudd). Hating his place in life, spouting off some nasty remarks to some unassuming people and treating kids with even more disdain. In the course of the day that sets the pace of this movie, Danny drinks about 20 Minotaur energy drinks, proposes to his girlfriend and gets rejected and then in the midst of getting his truck towed, drives up on a school statue.Instead of serving 30 days in jail, Danny along with womanizing friend Wheeler (Scott) have to serve 150 hours at Sturdy Wings, a Big Brother/Big Sisters type place where the two co-workers have to deal with kids that they normally wouldn’t deal with- or serve the jail time.

Danny has to play mentor to Dungeons and Dragons style disciple Augie (Mintz-Plasse a.k.a.'McLovin' from Superbad), while Wheeler deals with the foul mouthed, breast obsessed Ronnie (Bobb’e Thompson). Both of them have their 150 hours cut out for them, and the guys plow through the time with some cringing, but some hilarious results.

With Role Models, producer Judd Apatow has found his niche of foul humor with a touch of sweetness and is running with it like the Jamaican guy who won all those medals in the Olympics. The structure and direction of the movie really doesn’t seem much different than previous Apatow related flicks 40-Year-Old Virgin or Knocked Up. The first half of the movie is blistering in its humor and raunch; such as the scene where Wheeler explains the concept of the Kiss song “Love Gun” to the 10-year-old Ronnie, whose sex crazed mind eats it all up. With the first half firing on all cylinders, the second half falls into a predictable and sappy play of events that doesn’t do its first half justice.

But that’s not to knock the performances in the movie. Rudd and Scott make a fun comic team and it seems that Rudd channeled his Virgin performance while Scott updates the 'Stifler' character from the American Pie movies and make for some appealing lowbrow moments. But the scene stealer is Thompson’s Ronnie. All of 11-years-old, Thompson keeps up with the profanity and slapstick someone ten years older than him and completely steals the show from 'McLovin.'

Role Models is a dependably funny, yet ultimately cheesy comedy that will entertain, but won’t leave the impression of Apatow’s earlier movies.