Catching Up: 'Small Engine Repair' and 'Starling'

Two quick hits on movies I missed. Put these brief reviews under the heading “Better Late Than Never.” 

Small Engine Repair

Set in Manchester, New Hampshire, Small Engine Repair adapts a play by John Pollono for the screen. Pollono portrays Frank, a guy who runs the repair shop of the title. He has two pals (Shea Whigham and John Bernthal). For a while, it looks as if Small Engine Repair is going to be another evening with the bros, guys who often jockey to see who can be grosser. Pals for a long time, the men argue in a bar and stop talking. The story then leaps ahead to a night when Frank invites his estranged buddies to the repair shop for an evening of reconciliation. Another study in toxic masculinity, Small Engine Repair features performances by Jordana Spiro (as Frank's ex-wife) and Ciara Brava (as Frank's college-age daughter). The movie begins to shift gears when a college kid (Spencer House) shows up at Frank's shop and Pollono's screenplay begins to raise serious issues involving privacy, internet abuse, class conflict, and revenge. None of these themes are fleshed out enough to compensate for flashbacks of variable power and an ending that seems contrived to take some of the sting out of the meanness that precedes it. And in a movie focused largely on "the guys,'' Spiro has the movie's most commanding moment.

Starling

Starling, a movie about a husband and wife (Melissa McCarthy and Chris O'Dowd) attempting to cope with the loss of an infant daughter, casts Kevin Kline as a veterinarian who once was a prominent psychiatrist. The oddball combo of carers is indicative of something about the movie: Director Theodore Melfi mixes what seem like mismatched elements in a movie that makes a powerful subject seem almost banal. Burdened by sentiment, the movie derives its title from a bird that pesters McCarthy's character as she tries to garden. The screenplay by Matt Harris uses the bird -- a starling, of course -- as a metaphor for nest building and even, at one point, has McCarthy's Lily trying to nurse the pesky  bird back to health after she hits it with a stone. The movie mistakenly separates Lily and her husband Jack, who's in a mental institution after the loss of the child, which means we never really see them trying to work out their issues. No point in faulting the performances, but Starling is a wounded bird of a movie that just doesn't fly. 

Literary forgery for fun and profit

Can You Ever Forgive Me? features strong performances from Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant.

She drinks enough to qualify as an alcoholic. She once enjoyed success writing biographies but recently has fallen on hard times. She's so foul-mouthed that she can't hold a regular job. She's months behind in her rent and can't afford a visit to a veterinarian for her beloved cat. No one cares that she's interested in writing a biography of Fanny Brice, the comedienne played by Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl.

You'd be right to think that such a character makes a perfect fit for Melissa McCarthy, an actress who has worked mostly in profane, big-screen comedies that kicked off with 2011’s Bridesmaids. Sporting a bowl-shaped haircut, minimal makeup, and a wardrobe that barely exceeds thrift-store levels, McCarthy adds a serious twist to her big-screen resume in Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Playing a real-life character -- the late Lee Israel -- McCarthy makes ample use of her gift for invective but transfers it to a character mired in economic desperation and personal isolation. At a preview screening, it took a few moments for some members of the audience to realize that Can You Ever Forgive Me? intends to go for more than laughs.

Israel, who became a forger of highly collectible literary letters, lived the kind of fringe existence in Manhattan of the mid-90s that required mastery of many improvisational life skills.

Misanthropic and miserable, Lee has only one friend, a high-spirited gay man (Richard E. Grant). Grant's Jack Hock has no visible means of support but seems to survive with guile, charm and who knows what else.

Grant infuses his performance with a buoyancy that plays well against McCarthy's earth-bound qualities as a writer for whom crime becomes a means of self-expression.

Israel forged letters by Dorothy Parker, Noel Coward, and Lillian Hellman, mastering the art of stylistic mimicry and enlivening letters that often lacked enough spice to pique collector interest. The movie's title derives from one of Israel’s first forays into the world of crime, a postscript she attached to a letter written by Brice.

When exposure and FBI interest looms, Israel takes to stealing real letters from various archives and replacing them with her carefully crafted forgeries. With no one able to question the authenticity of the stolen letters, Israel's business continued.

Working from a screenplay by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty, director Marielle Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl) does a good job of showing how Israel's scheme was born: She chanced upon letters by Brice and began doctoring them. Eventually, she sustained her fraud with a room full of antique typewriters.

Israel also learned to navigate the rarified world of memorabilia collecting. When she fell under suspicion, she recruited Hock to peddle her fake letters. Hock proved himself a worthy accomplice -- if a less-than-reliable apartment sitter.

Movies about con jobs long have had appeal, but Heller introduces us to a highly specialized form of fraud, one that required knowledge, skill and a genuine respect for literature. Israel took pride in being able to write like a variety of great writers. As she puts it, she was able to be more Parker than Parker herself.

Several strong supporting performances round out the movie's pleasures. Jane Curtin appears as Israel's literary agent, a woman who can't (and who won't) push Israel's Brice biography and who knows that no one wants to work with such an ill-tempered woman. Dolly Wells does a nice job as Anna, a bookstore owner who also sells memorabilia and who is awestruck to meet Israel, whose biographies of actress Tallulah Bankhead and columnist Dorothy Kilgallen she has read.

Anna Deavere Smith impresses in a brief appearance as Lee's former lover, a woman who ultimately couldn't tolerate Israel's demanding, demeaning personality. The various booksellers Israel meets during the course of her felonious activities are rendered with credibility and concision.

A straightforward treatment by Heller allows story and performance to dominate the movie. I'm not sure that there's any great moral to be drawn from all this, but Can You Ever Forgive Me? entertains right up until an end that suggests that Israel’s reformation retained trace elements of defiance. Refreshing.

Puppets, profanity and a shortage of movie

Muppet-like puppets go crude in Happytime Murders.

If you've ever had a desire to see Muppet-like puppets talk dirty, you may find a few laughs in The Happytime Murders, a production of Henson Alternative and director Brian Henson (son of the late Jim Henson). The Happytime Murders quickly reveals itself as a kind of crude Judd Apatow wannabe, a comic helping of noir that's trying way too hard to wring laughs from the incongruity between puppets and profanity. Set in a fantasy version of LA, where puppets and humans live in uneasy proximity, the story centers on former LAPD puppet detective Phil Philips (Bill Barretta). Early on, Phil, now working as a private investigator, takes a case brought to him by a ludicrously oversexed blonde puppet (Dorien Davies). The movie centers on Phil's efforts to discover who's bumping off the cast of a defunct puppet TV show -- The Happytime Gang. With the show about to go into syndication, there's money at stake. Oddly, the best work in the movie comes from the human cast. As an LAPD detective who once served as Phil's partner, Melissa McCarthy brings snap to the snide insults she trades with Phil. Maya Rudolph has an equally nice turn as Bubbles, Phil's secretary. Elizabeth Banks turns up as the only human member of the Happytime Gang cast. A major sight gag involves puppet sex and prolonged ejaculation, which should give you a clue about the level of humor. What's missing? A level of sophistication that might have turned Happytime into something more worthy. As it stands, watching the cotton innards blasted out of puppet murder victims doesn't exactly serve as wry commentary on movie violence. Look, there's nothing much to say about Happytime Murders other than to tell you that there are a couple of laughs and not much else to fill a 90-minute running time. If you go, stay for the end credits, which show how the movie's puppets were integrated into a human world.

Melissa McCarthy parties on -- and on

A mother joins her daughter as a college student in Life of the Party.

It’s entirely possible that a woman who gave up her career ambitions when she committed to marriage and raising a daughter might return to college to complete her senior year, particularly after being dumped by her husband of 23 years. It’s also possible that enough time would have passed that the woman's daughter could have arrived at her senior year in college, as well. It's even possible that mother and daughter would find themselves enrolled at the same university.

Considering all this, it’s not too much of a stretch to view Melissa McCarthy’s new comedy, Life of the Party, as a plausible effort to show what might happen if such a mother/daughter situation developed in the hallowed halls of fictional Decatur University.

But that’s where credibility ends and comedy (or what passes for it) begins in Life of the Party, a movie that provides an answer to a question you probably haven’t spent much time considering -- at least I hope not. What could be less appealing than an R-rated McCarthy comedy directed by her real-life husband Ben Falcone (Tammy and The Boss)? Yep, it’s a PG-13 rated comedy from the same team.

The mostly wan Life of the Party follows McCarthy’s Deanna into the dorms of Decatur and turns her into an archeology student who doesn’t dig up enough laughs to earn Life of the Party a passing grade.

At first, Deanna’s daughter’s (Molly Gordon) expresses embarrassment at having her mom around campus. But without much by way of transition, mother and daughter find a new bond as gal pals.

Daughter helps Mom with a fashion makeover that takes her from prim and proper to a woman who appeals to a college kid (Luke Benward) with whom she has hot sex. As Deanna puts it, she rocks his world.

Of the supporting cast, Maya Rudolph, as Deanna's best friend, gives a ribald edge of an otherwise staid suburban woman. Matt Walsh is wasted as Deanna’s ex, a man who has taken up with a realtor (Julie Brown) who bosses him around and immediately sells the home in which he and Deanna lived. The house was in his name.

Deanna has a sullen, self-isolating roommate (Heidi Gardner), but the sisters in her daughter's sorority are a fairly generic group for whom Deanna morphs from a fish-out-of-water woman into an inspirational figure.

Supposed high points protrude self-consciously from the mix. These include a scene in which Deanna and her college cohorts trash her ex-husband’s wedding, a scene at an 80s themed party at which Deanna dominates the dance floor, and a restaurant scene which Deanna confronts her former husband.

The restaurant scene lands some laughs, perhaps because it contains one of the movie's few surprises.

The only moment I found slightly amusing was a bit of physical comedy in which Deanna fumbles her way through an oral archaeology mid-term, engaging in battle with a recalcitrant lectern. Maybe I’m clutching at straws but the bit reminded me of Jerry Lewis. A little?

Otherwise, Life of the Party suggests that the filmmakers might do well to return to comedy school for a refresher in how to avoid the kind of formula traps that tend to neuter comic potential.

Women vs. ghosts, no winners

If you thought a female version of Ghostbusters would save the summer, think again.

For some time now, a stream of on-line scorn has been directed at the new Ghostbusters, which attempts to reboot the 1984 original with women in the principal roles.

A confession: I don't regard the original, which starred Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd and Ernie Hudson, as an inviolable work or even a great movie. And in a time of remakes, do-overs and sequels, a Ghostbusters reboot should do little to denigrate anyone's pop-cultural sacred cows.

So, no, the idea of the movie doesn't bother me in the least. The movie? Truth be told, it didn't bother me, either, but it also didn't make me laugh enough to enthuse over it.

As a special-effects driven comedy, the 2016 edition of Ghostbusters can't scare up enough yucks to haunt a closet, a problem that should come as a surprise to those who believe that Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon are capable of brilliant comic work.

McKinnon outdoes her comic compatriots, but this quartet gets slimed by the overblown scale of the production.

Adding Chris Hemsworth as a sexy but dumb receptionist was an interesting comic idea in gender reversal, but one that's beaten to death before the original Ghostbusters gang begins to turn up in dutifully placed cameos.

The wittiest cameo belongs to the late Harold Ramis, who appears as a bust on a mantel in the background of an early scene.

As for the rest: There's plenty of green slime and a few chuckles, but mostly the movie wastes an opportunity to bring four gifted comic actresses together for what should have been one of summer's surefire bets.

Director Paul Feig (Bridesmaids) might have been in the unenviable position of having to keep fans of the original happy and make a refreshing new comedy.

Plot? Yeah, there's a semblance of one, but who really cares? I can't imagine you'll shiver because of Neil Casey, who plays Rowan, a creep with evil plans.

The movie's idea of feminist assertion arrives in the form of an online barb one of the characters shares with her colleagues. "Ain't no bitches gonna bust no ghosts."

Ghostbusters, of course, is meant to challenge that notion as its quartet of ghost fighters aims ray-spewing devices at a series of phantoms.

But the movie is too mired in blockbuster sensibilities to say much of anything. And if it has little to say and too few laughs, what exactly is the point?

Still, I guess Ghostbusters can be considered a form of progress. Why should only men be able to make silly, bloated comedies?

Melissa McCarthy, crude again

The Boss breaks no new ground for its star.

In The Boss, Melissa McCarthy portrays a tycoon who has been ranked the 47th richest woman in the world, a self-absorbed striver who loses everything after an insider-trading scandal and then stages a comeback.

Too bad McCarthy's foul-mouthed Michelle Darnell doesn't make her way into the top 47 funniest characters in movies. She's not even close.

Teaming with her husband, director Ben Falcone, who directed her in the equally lame Tammy, McCarthy tries to spice up a one dimensional comedy with intermittent helpings of slapstick and even heavier doses of crude humor.

McCarthy reportedly created the movie's main character when she was a member of The Groundlings, a Los Angeles comedy troupe. Let's just say that McCarthy, who co-wrote the screenplay with Falcone and Steve Mallory, hasn't come up with the most imaginative ways to put this character into a 99-minute movie.

After a stint at a federal prison, a newly impoverished Michelle takes up residence with a former assistant named Claire (Kristen Bell) and Claire's daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson).

After accompanying Anderson's Rachel to a meeting of a Girl Scout-like organization called The Dandelions, Michelle devises a money-making scheme. She'll form her own group ("Darnell's Darlings") and sell brownies for profit. Her kiddie sales force will receive 10 percent commissions.

Meanwhile, Michelle's nemesis, another tycoon played by Peter Dinklage plots to reduce her burgeoning brownie empire to rubble.

Among the movie's bad ideas -- and there are many -- two standout. One involves a no-holds-barred fist fight between the Dandelions and Darnell's Darlings. The other centers on a climactic sword fight (no, I'm not kidding) between Dinklage's Renault and Michelle.

Somewhere along the line Kathy Bates turns up as Ida, a woman who helped Michelle on her meteoric rise and who agrees to lend financial support to her new enterprise.

If you step back from this McCarthy dominated mess, you may realize that she had an opportunity to use this character as a Trump-like launch pad for one hell of a satire.

Instead, the movie's principal strategy (streaming profanity in inappropriate places) feels so familiar, it's a non-starter.

McCarthy boasts a new short, red hairdo, but little else about her work in The Boss feels fresh. Michelle may be more upscale than some of McCarthy's previous characters, but McCarthy's doing another variation on the same-old joke. At this rate, she's likely to turn herself into a one-woman formula.

The salvation of a nasty old man

Bill Murray is at his scuzzy best in St. Vincent, but too much sentiment diminishes his accomplishment..

When we talk about movies that canonize their characters, we're usually talking metaphorically. Although St. Vincent, which stars Bill Murray, doesn't actually confer sainthood on the character Murray plays, it comes as close as possible without submitting its case to the Vatican, complete with two certified miracles.

Murray, who can look disheveled even when he's standing still, plays a man on the verge of dereliction. Financial troubles have put Murray's Vincent in danger of losing his Brooklyn home. But it doesn't look as if Vincent would need much by way of external pressure to have him heading for the local saloon or the race track.

Desperate for money, Vincent agrees to babysit for a kid who just has moved next door (Jaeden Lieberher). Newly separated from her husband, the boy's mother (Melissa McCarthy) knows no one in her new neighborhood and must rely on the acerbic Vincent for help.

So will a cute and very bright boy worm his way into Vincent's cold heart?

Come on, it's a movie, and no matter how gruff Murray plays Vincent, we know from the outset that he'll eventually prove himself to be a decent enough fellow.

The movie wastes little time reassuring us that hard-ass Vincent has a good side: Fairly early on, Vincent is shown visiting his wife in the upscale nursing facility where he's struggling to keep her.

Murray makes it touchingly clear that Vincent loves this woman, who's evidently stricken with Alzheimer's. Perhaps Vincent's life started its down-hill plummet when his wife was institutionalized.

Occasionally, Vincent has sex with a pregnant Russian pole-dancer and prostitute (Naomi Watts). He treats her with scorn, but we know that when the chips are down, he'll come through for her, too.

Late in the movie, Vincent suffers a stroke, which pushes him into disability territory, and perhaps opens an Oscar path for Murray.

It's clear that Murray, who knows how to play nasty, could have made a sentiment-free movie about a man who's going to spend the rest of his life stewing in his beer.

But director Theodore Melfi doesn't have the stomach for flat-out misery, and he pushes the film toward an ending that shamelessly tugs at happily-ever-after heart strings.

Murray keeps St. Vincent watchable, and it's refreshing to see McCarthy play a character who's not cut from the same crude cloth that seems to have characterized most of her work since Bridesmaids (2011).

Still, the main reason to see St. Vincent is to savor of the bitter tastes Murray brings to this character and to imagine the hard-bitten movie that could have been.

In the end, though, St. Vincent's sweet-and-sour mix doesn't totally compute: It's like getting a sappy Valentine's card from Charles Bukowski.

Melissa McCarthy's summer stumble

Tammy's as crude as you'd expect, but not as funny as you might have hoped.

Few things are more painful than being stuck in a moving vehicle with people who you find annoying. That's exactly how I felt watching Tammy, a movie that puts Melissa McCarthy and Susan Sarandon on the road.

Painfully misguided, Tammy is the result of a collaboration between McCarthy and her husband Ben Falcone, who co-wrote the screenplay with McCarthy and who also handled the directing chores.

Tammy finds McCarthy playing the title character, the wayward granddaughter of an aging alcoholic (Sarandon).

After being fired from her job at a fast-food franchise, McCarthy's Tammy sets out on a road trip with her grandmother, who supplies the car -- an aging Cadillac -- and the money that supports a journey toward Niagara Falls, a stop on grandma's bucket list.

All of this takes place over the objections of Tammy's mother (Allison Janney), who understands that grandma is both a diabetic and a drunk, and shouldn't be let loose on an unsuspecting world.

Sarandon may be game for anything, but she's given scenes that struck me as embarrassing: carrying on in the backseat of a car with a guy (Cary Cole) she meets in a bar or having a drunken outburst at a Fourth of July party thrown by her lesbian cousin (Kathy Bates).

McCarthy's luckier: Her previous comic roles have immunized her against embarrassment. Here, she plays a foul-mouthed woman whose husband (Nat Faxon) is having an affair with a neighbor (Toni Collette).

As is the case with many crude comedies, Tammy feels the need to sentimentalize its main character before it's done, something like an boisterous drunk who ends the evening crying in his beer.

Tammy 's told -- via lame dialogue Bates delivers with unnecessary conviction -- that she needs to take control of her life and stop wallowing in self-pity.

She's supposed to do this even though her drunken aunt has grabbed a microphone and told the partying lesbians that Tammy's a fat loser worthy of the nickname "cheeseburger."

Sarandon has been made to look as old as possible, even to the point of donning artificially swollen ankles, but she's never convincingly dissolute.

In what may have been intended as a comic high point, Tammy puts a paper bag on her head and robs a fast-food outlet after fashioning another paper bag into a pretend revolver. She needs money to bail grandma out of jail.

If this was intended as the movie's comic high point, it's not much of one.

Mark Duplass plays the son of the man who picked up grandma in a bar and a potential love interest for Tammy, the movie's lone representative of normalcy.

Tammy tries to get by making lame jokes about old folks, dishing out crude humor and toying with the image McCarthy has created in previous comedies such as Identity Thief, The Heat and, of course, in Bridesmaids, the movie that provided her with a breakthrough role.

Maybe because it's summer, Tammy even finds an excuse to blow up grandma's car. If only that had happened before grandma and Tammy had had a chance to get into it.

'Hangover III': Big finale or big fizzle?

It's difficult for me to call the latest Hangover movie anything but a major disappointment.
Two big-screen money machines are set to invade the nation's multiplexes this week -- the third movie in the Hangover series and the sixth Fast and Furious movie. We begin with the Hangover Part 3, which opens a day earlier than Fast and Furious 6 -- and which is considerably more disappointing than its speed-obsessed competition.

As just about everyone now knows, the first Hangover movie became one of 2009's monster hits, a surprise attack of blatantly crude humor that boosted two careers, those belonging to Bradley Cooper and Zach Galifianakis.

Cooper, of course, went on to earn an Academy Award nomination for his work in Silver Linings Playbook, and Galifianakis has become an indispensable addition to a long line of taste-defying comics who'll step across almost any line.

The series' third -- and apparently final installment -- probably won't hurt either actor, even though The Hangover Part III a half-serious (and none too exciting) thriller plot hijacks most of the laughs.

The movie's first joke (already spoiled by its trailer) involves the decapitation of a giraffe. This bit of animal carnage arrives courtesy of Alan, the proudly stupid character played by Galifianakis. Obviously, the filmmakers did not behead a real animal, but the off-putting joke (one of many) was enough to make me consider becoming a card-carrying PETA member.

The familiar crew (Cooper, Ed Helms and Justin Bartha) returns under the guidance of director Todd Phillips, whose slick approach seems at odds with the ragged spirit of the best Hangover jokes. Putting this kind of production value into a Hangover movie seems as misguided as hiring James Levine to conduct an all-kazoo orchestra -- not that Phillips qualifies as a maestro of movies.

This episode adds a couple of new wrinkles. John Goodman portrays a gangster who's upset about the fact that the sexually dubious Chow (an over-exposed Ken Jeong) has stolen millions in gold from him. Melissa McCarthy appears as the operator of a Las Vegas pawn shop where Chow unloads the purloined gold.

A scene in which McCarthy confronts her cinematic soul mate (Galifianakis) teeters on the edge of being funny without quite tumbling into the expected hilarity.

The story eventually sends our heroes back to Las Vegas, perhaps in hopes of recapturing some of the brazenness of the hard-partying first movie. The strategy produces an insufficient number of laughs while Phillips plays around with thriller tropes and the actors await their obligatory doses of humiliation.

Oddly, there's hardly any drinking in this installment, and the only real hangover stems from whatever residual affection audiences can muster for characters whose unashamed pursuit of pleasure has led them into many drastically compromising situations. Put another way, Hangover Part 3 runs on whatever comic vapors linger from the first installment.

I've never been a big fan of the Hangover movies, but I certainly understood the appeal of the first movie, which pushed the envelope of grossness to what approached genre-breaking limits. I was unimpressed by the overproduced waste of the second and entirely dismayed by a third edition that stops in Tijuana before heading to Vegas.

A sequence following the end credits pays homage to the outrageous spirit of the movie's 2009 predecessor -- but it's a classic case of arriving too late to make much difference. Hard-core Hangover fans who stick around for this epilogue -- which boasts the movie's wildest sight gag -- may think that this is precisely where Hangover Part III should have started.

'Identity Thief' can't steal a laugh

Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy in a formulaic road comedy that mines a garbage heap of gags..

Just when I thought things couldn't possibly get worse or less funny, the abysmally contrived Identity Thief introduced a car chase, a move for which the phrase "insult to injury" surely was invented.

Identity Thief wastes both Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman in a road-trip comedy that produces more grimaces than laughs.

Maybe McCarthy (Bridesmaids and This is 40) is best in small doses. Here, she comes close to wearing out her welcome as Diana, a Florida-based thief who steals other people's identities and uses their credit card info to finance wanton spending sprees.

A woeful script has Diana stealing the identity of Sandy Paterson (Bateman), a Denver-based husband and father. Threatened with bankruptcy and the loss of a new job, Sandy decides to travel to Florida to corral his nemesis, bring her back to Colorado and save what's left of his crumbling life and shattered reputation.

The cross-country trip is supposed to be excruciating for Bateman's Sandy, but it's equally painful for us as director Seth Gordon wades through a large pile of gag garbage, which includes car carnage and Diana's encounter with a horny widower named Big Chuck (Eric Stonestreet). Meanwhile, Diana is being pursued by a sleazy skip tracer (Robert Patrick) and two assassins (Genesis Rodriguez and T.I.) who operate on orders from a guy in prison.

Don't ask whether any of this tracks. Like just about everything else in this brashly distasteful comedy, very little makes sense.

You can tell the movie will flounder right from the start. Sandy, who's supposed to be a financial guy, improbably and foolishly falls for an obvious ruse. He gives his name and Social Security number to Diana, who poses as an official who calls to tell him that someone's trying to mess with his credit.

How likely is it that a guy who manages the finances of an investment company wouldn't do a bit of investigating before turning over his Social Security number?

Of course, credibility wouldn't matter if Identity Thief produced sufficient laughs as Diana and Sandy work their way toward Denver.

McCarthy can be very funny, and she certainly knows how to steal a scene, but her one-note truculence gets old when spread over 111 minutes. Poor Bateman. He winds up in the thankless job of straight man, as well as the butt of dumb jokes about his character's masculinity.

Not unexpectedly, this mess of a road trip takes a few sentimental turns that are supposed to make us like Diana, despite the fact that she's a pathological liar and felon.

Vulgar jokes, crashed cars and sentiment? McCarthy and Bateman, two actors who know how to be funny, deserved better.

This is 40 -- and it's pretty funny

Judd Apatow puts a toe into mature waters, but doesn't forget to bring along the laughs.

It takes a long time to get to her, but when the new Judd Apatow comedy, This is 40, arrives at a scene that's stolen by Melissa McCarthy, the humor suddenly becomes incendiary, foul-mouthed and very funny. Building on the crudeness she established in Bridesmaids, McCarthy scores big -- so big, in fact, that writer/director Apatow had the good sense to include one of her character's rants in an outtake.

But I digress, even before I begin.

In this mostly enjoyable outing, Apatow casts Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann (Apatow's real-life wife) as a husband and wife who also happen to be the self-absorbed parents of two daughters (Apatow's real daughters, Maude and Iris). Rudd's Pete runs a Los Angeles-based record company devoted to indulging his passion for '70s rock. Mann's Debbie owns an upscale boutique. And, yes, This is 40 represents a reunion for Rudd and Mann, both of whom appeared in Apatow's 2007 comedy, Knocked Up.

Of course, Pete and Debbie are way past knocked up. They're deeply ensconced in the grind of family life. Over the years, their relationship has lost a good deal of its romantic luster. Not surprisingly, Pete and Debbie have issues -- not the least of which revolves around the financial help Pete gives to his father (Albert Brooks), a likable freeloader who has started a new family.

A sharply funny Brooks -- who immediately raises the movie's comic ante -- plays an older man married to a younger woman and now grappling with three young children. Long on gall, Dad views any resistance by Pete as evidence of his son's selfishness. Never mind that Pete has financial troubles of his own.

Perhaps to balance things, Debbie's father (John Lithgow) enters the picture, as well. He's also married to a younger woman, and has been estranged from his daughter for years.

As the movie progresses, Lithgow's character sheds the bonds of caricature and becomes a real, flesh-and-blood father. Credit Apatow with mixing some expectedly crude humor (not all of it funny) with a few well-played scenes in which the writer/director makes a welcome journey into adult territory. Hey, at least he's putting a toe in deeper waters.

Unlike a comedy such as The Guilt Trip, This is 40 is no anemic two-hander. Apatow not only makes room for Brooks and Lithgow, but for Jason Siegel (as an overly confident physical trainer), Graham Parker (as a musician who can't sell any of his new recordings), Chris O'Dowd (as one of Pete's employees) and Megan Fox (as a woman who works in Debbie's boutique).

That's a decent amount of support for a comedy that aspires to be attuned to the debilitations of middle-age, many of them shockingly trivial. Pete is a little too fond of cupcakes. Debbie likes to sneak cigarettes. In this sun-splashed and mostly prosperous LA world, what could be more sinful than overeating or doing something that poses a direct threat to robust good health?

At 134 minutes, This is 40 probably overstays its welcome, and no one's likely to confuse it with Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, which Apatow reportedly watched before making his movie. OK, so Apatow isn't making great art, but, then again, Bergman didn't get many laughs, either.