'Irresistible?' Try lukewarm satire instead

Just about everything that Jon Stewart wants to say in his new movie Irresistible shows up in the movie’s epilogue, which consists of real people talking about how big money has corrupted American democracy.

Prior to that, you’ll find a satire that dulls its edge with unexpected timidity and a big dose of conventional comedy.

Here's the story: Steve Carell plays Gary Zimmer, a hotshot political operative whose attention perks up when an aide informs him that a rural town in Wisconsin can be flipped to the Democratic side of the ledger. Why? Because a straight-talking farmer and former Marine (Chris Cooper) addressed the town’s city council with a speech so sincere it might have made Gary Cooper blush. He's exactly the kind of person who might lure wary independents to the Dems.

The plan: Persuade Cooper’s character to run for mayor, upset the political balance, and prove that a Democrat can capture the hearts of middle-Americans.

Gary heads for the town of Deerlarken, Wisc., where he’s a fish-out-of-water, a sophisticate who finds himself at a remove from Washington’s “civilized” ways: high-speed internet connections, fancy restaurants, and room service.

Of course, things can’t go smoothly or there’s no movie. Enter Rose Byrne's Faith Brewster,  the GOP's answer to Gary. Savvy and ruthless, Faith represents powerful interests that don’t want to see the town turn Blue.

Carell and Byrne banter as they create some chemistry, the attraction of opposites who can’t resist trying to outdo each other when it comes to political maneuvering. The movie also hints at a possible relationship between Gary and Jack's grown daughter (Mackenzie Davis).

In one of the more predictable scenes, Gary takes Jack to New York City to meet a group of liberal elitists with whom he has nothing in common. He’s supposed to ask for money to finance a campaign they’ve been told might be the beginning of a national transformation. Of course, they can't get enough of Jack's homespun honesty.

All of this builds toward a twist that reveals Stewart’s real purpose, a kind of backhanded celebration of all-American wisdom that raises the question: If politics is a cynical game, why can’t more people play?

Look, I laughed some, I enjoyed watching the cast — particularly the comically gifted Byrne — and I never tuned the movie out. But in the end, I felt letdown.

In a moment of political volatility, I expected a comedy with a little more grit in its craw — not one that ends with a lecture, even one that's on-point about desperately need campaign-finance reform. Where’s the anger? Where’s the outrage? Where’s the feeling that things are so out-of-control that no fix may be possible? Where’s the recognition that even if we had campaign finance reform, there would still be voter suppression and a host of other seemingly intractable problems?

Enough. I don’t want to write a total slam, but it's difficult to see Irresistible as too much more than a movie of squandered promise.

A shattered man's world of dolls

Steve Carell portrays a man obsessed with World War II in Welcome to Marwen.

Director Robert Zemeckis has devoted a substantial portion of his career to films that play with cinematic convention. We’re talking about movies ranging from Who Framed Roger Rabbit to The Polar Express to Beowulf to A Christmas Carol. In Welcome to Marwen, Zemeckis continues his fascination with artificial worlds. Throughout the movie, he shifts from "normal" big screen reality to a world full of dolls that resemble characters in the movie's real-world story.

Welcome to Marwen is based on the life of Mark Hogancamp, a photographer whose work consists mostly of taking photos in and around Marwencol, a fictional miniature Belgian town he built in his backyard and populated with dolls and other toys.

If that sounds familiar, it could be for two reasons: Hogancamp’s photographs have been featured in several New York galleries and Hogancamp’s life was the subject of a fascinating 2010 documentary by Jeff Malmberg.

Those who’ve seen Malmberg's documentary already know Hogancamp’s backstory. In 2000, he was severely beaten outside a bar in upstate New York by five thugs who objected to him talking about the enjoyment he got from wearing women’s shoes. Hogancamp was in a coma for 40 days, lost all memory of his personal life prior to the assault and then began to channel his anxieties and rage into World War II tableaus in Marwencol. He had a particular fascination with battling against Nazis and his fantasies took on a pulpy, comic-book quality.

So what was left to say after the documentary? As it turns out, not much.

In Welcome to Marwen, the stories that take place inside of Marwen (all enacted with dolls that resemble characters from Hogancamp's life and voiced by actors) aren't all that interesting and the overall story vacillates between being creepy and heart-warming, never quite making up its mind which map to follow.

Using his terrible beating as an explanation, Carell portrays Hogancamp as a shattered man who long ago lost the ability to read social signals. He's briefly enamored with a new neighbor (Leslie Mann), mistaking her kindness for romantic interest.

Meritt Wever plays the owner of the local hobby shop Hogancamp frequents and Diane Kruger provides the voice of Deja Thoris, a witch-like figure who haunts Hogancamp and his Marwen alter-ego figure, Cap'n Hogie.

Working from a screenplay he co-wrote with Caroline Thompson, Zemeckis takes a stab at illuminating serious issues involving hate crimes, personal freedom (symbolized by Hogancamp's preference for wearing women's high-heeled shoes) and tolerance.

Alan Silvestri's score might have been better suited to a magical fantasy; here, it seems at odds with Hogancamp's story.

I wondered if Tim Burton, a director more willing to lean into weird material, might have been a better choice for this story. Zemeckis largely remains outside of Hogancamp's world, turning us into observers.

Welcome to Marwen offers some clever visual touches but never makes it clear what we're supposed to feel about Hogancamp: Is he a crackpot? An emotionally crippled victim? An artist? The movie didn't need to answer all (or any) of those questions, but unlike the documentary, I left without wanting to give them much further thought.

A father struggles with his son's addiction

Beautiful Boy grapples with a big subject without achieving full success.

An addiction drama starring Timothee Chalamet and Steve Carell, Beautiful Boy deals with a father who desperately tries to help his talented, once-promising 18-year-old son kick a meth habit.

Chalamet's performance and the painful relevance of the movie's subject carry it a long way, but Beautiful Boy falls short of the dramatic powerhouse that surely must have been intended.

Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen tells the story of David Sheff (Carell), a successful freelance journalist who finds it impossible to accept his son’s precipitous decline. Nic (Chalamet) has gone from being a model child with a glowing future to a drug-addicted loser who seems permanently to have lost his way. Somehow, Nic has stumbled into a death spiral of a life.

Shackled to flashbacks to healthier times, the movie grinds away at our sympathies by showing the halting (and vaguely monotonous) ways in which Nic's cycle of recovery and relapse unfolds.

Based on books by both the real father and son (David Sheff's Beautiful Boy and Nic Sheff's Tweak), the movie casts its heaviest gaze on Carell's character. David and his artsy second wife (Maura Tierney) have two additional children, but most of David's attention is absorbed by Nic's increasingly powerful addiction. No matter how hard Dad tries, he’s unable to push Nic's life back on track.

The movie asks an audience to become involved in the struggles of a family that seems to fit most known definitions of "privileged." I know a few freelance writers and they don't seem to be living as well as Carell's David, a journalist who has a wonderfully appealing house in Northern California.

Perhaps director Van Groeningen (The Broken Circle Breakdown) sees that as part of the point. Even the well-heeled of Marin County can't immunize their kids from the scourge of drugs. It's possible for parents to do all the right things and still be blindsided by tragedy.

A bearded, super-earnest Carell carries a major burden here. He must show David's desire for control, his journalistic inquisitiveness (at one point he even tries drugs himself) and a father's one-note persistence when it comes to his wayward son. Looking drearily somber, Carell isn't entirely up to the task.

Riding high on praise from his work in Call Me By Your Name, Chalamet continues to impress as a smart kid who knows how to rationalize his drug use. He says meth enables him to see a drab black-and-white world in color. Chalamet also hints at Nic's rebellion against being a creative, success-bound child and budding writer.

Nic's decline comes into sharpest focus when he and a girlfriend (Kaitlyn Dever) hit low points of homelessness and physical decay on the streets of San Francisco.

I suppose the movie deserves credit for not specifying exactly why Nic has become an addict. Instead of providing pat answers, Beautiful Boy asks us to share in the torments of its characters, but it can feel like a tutorial on the way drug addiction impacts families.

A screenplay credited to Luke Davies (Lion) and Van Groeningen hints that for Nic to abandon his drug habit, David must let go of a carefully constructed image of his son, an intriguing idea but one that probably doesn't come into sharp enough focus as the movie wends its way through an often-exhausting 111 minutes.

Three Vietnam veterans take to the road

Richard Linklater's Last Flag Flying , a moderately successful mix of humor, sorrow and the bonds of brotherhood.

In director Richard Linklater's Last Flag Flying, three Vietnam veterans reunite for a sad task. One of them has lost a son in Iraq. The mission: To bury a young Marine.

Two former Marines are played by Bryan Cranston and Laurence Fishburne. Steve Carell 's Larry Shepherd -- nicknamed Doc -- served as medic in the Navy and wound up alongside Cranston and Fishburne's characters in the heat of Vietnam combat.

Last Flag Flying is based on novelist Darryl Ponicsan's sequel to The Last Detail, which was made into a 1973 movie starring Jack Nicholson, Randy Quaid and Otis Young. Ponicsan co-authored the screenplay for Last Flag with Linklater, and the movie has some (but not all) of Last Detail's comic bite.

It's 2003: The movie's principals may have thought that their war-time experiences were safely locked in the vaults of the past, but their journey forces them to come to grips with their war-time behavior as well as with the nature of the sacrifices all young men make when they go off to war.

Low key and steeped in the kind of naturalism Linklater favors, the director's moderately affecting look at the deep-rooted impact of war begins when Doc tracks down Cranston's Sal Nealon, a boisterous fellow who owns a Norfolk, Va., bar where he seems to drink as much as he sells. The two then set out to find Fishburne's Richard Mueller, a tightly wound former Marine who has tried to push the war and his wild youth out of his consciousness. He has become a reverend.

Doc, who was dishonorably discharged from the Navy, is younger than the others and going through a particularly bad patch. Not only has son been killed in action, but he recently lost his wife to cancer. Doc refers to his Bad Conduct Discharge (BCD) as a Better Career Decision, but it's clear that the military made Doc something of a goat. Doc has not had an easy time of it, but somehow has avoided trapping himself behind bars of bitterness.

Questions arise about how Doc's son died. The Marines want to enshrine the young man as a hero, but the details of the young man's death turn out to be more horrific than heroic.

When Doc learns the truth, he refuses to have his son buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Despite the urging of a Marine colonel (Yul Vazquez), Doc won't allow the Marines to propagandize his son's death. He insists on burying the boy in his hometown of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Military protocol requires that the young man's body be accompanied to its resting place. J. Quinton Johnson plays the young Marine assigned to this grim task: He joins the three older men as they make their way north from Delaware, where they have traveled to pick up the body.

As is the case with any road movie, the personalities of the men emerge as the trip unfolds: Cranston's Sal is happily boorish; Fishburne's Mueller has given up drink and tried to live a life of serenity and prayer, but you get the feeling that his newfound propriety can't entirely protect him from his past. "Doc" proves the quietest of the trio, a man whose soul droops with the weight of grief and regret. Doc found stability and peace in family life -- but, now, even that has been taken from him.

There's plenty of bickering as the men move toward the movie's sad finale, and some of the screenplay's bits feel labored: Sal's attempts to bring his compatriots into the 21st Century by buying them cell phones, for example.

Linklater mutes any political messaging. By the end, he makes it clear that these men aren't interested in honor or even patriotism. They claim a devotion to the Marine Corps, but what they really seem to cherish is their relationship to one another, bonds forged by a shared experience none of them ever will fully digest and which always will threaten to consume them. Still, like the Dude in The Big Lebowski, they abide -- psychic wounds and all.

A fight for equality or more hype?

Emma Stone and Steve Carell star in Battle of the Sexes, a movie about the much-heralded match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.

Battle of the Sexes -- the story of the much-hyped 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs -- isn't exactly a good movie, but it contains interesting work around the fringes.

Bill Pullman, to take one example, steeps his performance in a fully vested sense of privilege as Jack Kramer, a former tennis champ and executive director of the Association of Tennis Professionals. A staunch opponent of the idea that women and men tennis players should earn equal money, Pullman's Kramer stood at the head of the tennis establishment.

Pullman effortlessly imbues every ounce of his performance with an ingrained belief: Women never could equal men on the tennis court. I don't know what the real Kramer was like, but Pullman has been asked to embody the sexist beliefs of a sport that was male-dominated in the 1970s, and he uses the opportunity to deliver a character who has no idea that he's confusing prejudice with fact.

Another fine -- but also minor performance -- in Battle of the Sexes belongs to Elizabeth Shue, who plays Riggs's wife, Priscilla. The scene in which Priscilla dissolves their marriage becomes an exquisite rendering of decisiveness from a woman who understands that Riggs, a compulsive gambler, never will provide the stability she needs. Priscilla tells Riggs the marriage is over with a sense of dignity, authority, and love that's stunning in its compassion.

In line with Shue's performance, the movie treats endangered marriages with a kindness that's quite unusual. Prior to the big match, King's marriage is being tested. She begins a lesbian relationship with her hairdresser. King's husband (Austin Stowell) tries to weather the storm, holding his emotions in check.

It also should be noted that Sarah Silverman has a nice turn as Gladys Heldman, the savvy woman who helped organize and find funding for the women's tour that King and others started.

I know. I haven't said a word about the big match that the movie presents as a pivotal moment in the evolution of the women's movement. I also haven't mentioned that Emma Stone does a credible job as King, although I found myself constantly evaluating her against whatever memories I have of the real person.

With a set of crooked false teeth, Carrel gives an interesting spin to Riggs's life, making him a man whose chauvinism becomes shtick. At the time of the match, Riggs was 55; King was 29. Solely on the basis of his gender, Riggs tried to sell the idea that an aging male tennis star could beat a vibrant young woman with an exceptionally strong game. Riggs, of course, couldn't conquer the difference caused by age, even with a gargantuan supply of vitamin supplements.

You don't get the sense that Riggs totally believed in his chauvinistic rants. He was trying to sell tickets and provide himself with a big payday. For him, the match was an opportunity to put himself into the center ring of a circus -- until, of course, the moment when he realized that he couldn't beat King.

For King the stakes are higher: She wants to prove that women should be treated equally by the tennis authorities. Earlier in the movie, she leads a revolt in which women players withdraw from high-profile tournaments and create their own tour. The issue: equal pay.

Much of the movie (too much, I'd say) is taken up by the budding relationship between King and her hairdresser (Andrea Riseborough). At the time, any hint of gayness would have destroyed King's career, so she was forced to walk a thin line between her emotional needs and her public image.

In part, the movie is hampered by its structure. Directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton (Little Miss Sunshine) alternate between Riggs and King, a stylistic choice that's equivalent to putting a net between two parts of the narrative and, then, shifting from one side to the other. As a result, Battle of the Sexes can feel as though it's moving sideways instead of gaining forward momentum.

Faris and Dayton do a decent job with the big event, which took place in Houston's Astrodome. The surrounding hoopla almost overwhelmed the actual match, which King won easily.

During the match, the directors show us shots of women rooting for King and middle-aged men looking disconsolate as they realize that their avatar was headed for defeat.

Granted the '70s were a tumultuous time for male/female relations. I know. I was there. But the guys I knew at the time thought the King/Riggs spectacle had less to do with gender barriers than with hype: I didn't take the match seriously enough even to watch the ABC telecast of it.

Working from a script by Simon Beaufoy, the directors must have realized that they had loaded their plates, picking a subject that touches on gay emergence, marital woes, shifting cultural norms, the inflated atmosphere that can surround sports and the desire of some to cash in on all of the above. Faris and Dayton never quite find a tone to encompass the chaos that not only rocked the culture but impacted individual lives.

Put another way, this is one tennis movie that could have used more topspin.

A lukewarm helping of Woody Allen

Allen travels back to the 1930s for Cafe Society.

There was a time when a Woody Allen movie felt as if it were entirely of its moment. Anticipation for each new Allen movie ran high whether the director was operating in comic or serious mode. Then came scandal, the onslaught of age and a changing movie environment.

These days, a Woody Allen movie seldom feels like an occasion marked by urgency, so it's probably not surprising that Allen's latest -- Cafe Society -- retreats into the 1930s for a story split between Los Angeles and New York.

Though hardly a knockout, Cafe Days qualifies as a showcase of sorts, less for Allen than for his production designer, Santo Loquasto, and his cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro. Between them, they create a Los Angeles blessed by pre-pollution light and fashionable ease.

Allen's screenplay doesn't exactly break new thematic ground as it toys with issues involving love, infidelity, betrayal, guilt and navel gazing about mortality.

The story centers Bobby Doorman (Jesse Eisenberg), a Bronx kid who travels to California in search of a career. Bobby hopes that his Uncle Phil (Steve Carell) will help him get his feet on the ground.

Phil, you see, is one of Hollywood's top agents, a guy who knows everyone.

Bobby's parents (Jeannie Berlin and Ken Stott) disagree about whether Phil will be of much help. Mom says, "yes." Dad is skeptical, but his wife dismisses him as "stupid."

Phil gradually accepts Bobby as a trusted ally. Blood ties, after all, are stronger than the tenuous threads that stitch Hollywood alliances together.

Meanwhile, the story keeps a foot in New York, where it follows the development of Bobby's older brother Ben (Corey Stoll), a gangster whose power grows along with the number of bodies he buries in the cement of metropolitan area construction sites.

Allen -- again with Storaro's help -- has done something I didn't know was possible. He has made Kirsten Stewart, who portrays Phil's secretary, look like a movie star from another era. I don't think anyone has ever made Stewart look more classically beautiful.

Predictably, young Bobby falls for Stewart's Vonnie. The complication: Vonnie is the midst of an affair with her married boss, Carell's Phil. Will Vonnie realize that Bobby is the perfect man for her or will she cling to Phil?

Blake Lively enters the movie late; she plays Veronica, a woman who captivates Bobby -- at least briefly -- when he returns to New York to run Les Tropiques, a nightclub that his older brother Ben has acquired through thuggery.

All of this is narrated by Allen, making Cafe Society seem like one of Allen's New Yorker short stories. The movie passes easily, except for a couple of clinkers. A riff about one of the character's 11th hour conversions to Catholicism (it has an afterlife, Judaism doesn't) and an early-picture bit in which Bobby meets with an inexperienced hooker fall flat.

As the stand-in for the kind of character Allen once played, Eisenberg does well enough; Carell conveys Phil's self-assurance along with bouts of torment, but it's Stewart who emerges as the prize in Allen's ensemble.

Allen eventually unites the New York and Los Angeles parts of the movie, but the dramatic stakes seldom seem high enough to elevate Cafe Society above a lukewarm period piece about a couple of characters who obsess over the lives they might have led.

Different costumes and new actors can't disguise the fact that for Allen, Cafe Society is more of the same -- and the lesser for it.

A comic look at the road to ruin

Terrific performances, biting wit and insight make The Big Short one of the year's best movies.

The weird thing about The Big Short is this: At some point you realize (as do some of the movie's characters) that you're rooting for a group of guys to make a financial killing, but you also know that their success means the whole economy will tank.

So watching the movie leaves you feeling elated, dejected and angry in quick succession, which, I presume, is precisely what director Adam McKay intended when he adapted Michael Lewis' book about the devastations caused by the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market.

I've read criticisms of McKay's movie that focused on the fact that it's entertaining without being infuriating enough.

Maybe so, but I think McKay's effort has a different value: It focuses on the insanity that drove the mortgage market prior to 2008 when the bottom fell out. When confronted with this kind of damaging absurdity, we're tempted to think that two choices manifest: We either laugh or sink into the deepest of funks.

But McKay and a very able cast offer a third alternative: We do both -- and we applaud the efforts of a filmmaker who rips the mask off a brand of stupidity and greed that may not entirely have disappeared just because the economy has improved.

Now, the chances are pretty good that a whole lot of people don't really understand what happened with sub-prime mortgages. If someone asked you to define a CDO (collateralized debt obligation) could you do it? Same goes for a credit default swap.

Charles Randolph's screenplay goes a long way toward explaining such financial instruments, sometimes interrupting the movie's narrative flow with brief lectures from celebrities such as Margot Robbie, seen in a bathtub speaking directly to the camera. Anthony Bourdain and Selena Gomez also chime in.

At first, you wonder what the hell these people are doing in the movie, but you quickly realize that McKay has decided to make the necessary explanations as diverting as possible before returning to a story that's driven by terrific performances.

The tone is set early when Ryan Gosling appears as a Deutsche Bank hotshot who intermittently serves as our cynical guide through the story.

Christian Bale plays Michael Burry, a former MD who wears T-shirts and shorts at work, walks around his office barefoot and sometimes sits at desk beating a pair of drumsticks against his thighs. Burry's the genius who actually peeked inside the packaging and re-packaging of mortgage-backed securities and realized that they were built on air.

Given enough time, Burry knew the whole structure would collapse, which prompted him to set about inventing a mechanism to bet against a mortgage market that most regarded as rock solid.

Then there's Mark Baum (Steve Carell) a New York hedge fund manager with a conscience. When Gosling's Jared Venentt insists that it's time to bet against mortgages, Baum voices skepticism. So does his team.

Baum seems to combine two traits that can make life difficult for an ambitious investor: He wants to make money, and he also wants to view himself as an ethical player.

When Baum and his team tour Florida's devastated luxury housing market, they hardly can believe the mortgage bankers they encounter, guys who are more likely to sprout wings than develop anything resembling a conscience.

At a conference in Las Vegas, Baum meets with another wheeler-dealer. Again, he can't believe what he's hearing from a supposed maven. It may be a rationalization on Baum's part, but he convinces himself that these smug idiots deserve a comeuppance. He's more certain than ever that it's time to sell short.

But in what may be his best performance yet, Carell makes it clear that Baum won't be laughing all the way to the bank. He's genuinely worried about the pain the economy will suffer.

Those familiar with Lewis' book quickly will note that McKay has made alterations. But the gist is the same: For a time (and who knows if that time truly has ended) the economy was based on fraud, greed and a near-total disconnect from reality.

The economy became paper, and, in the end, wasn't worth what it was printed on.

And then there's Brad Pitt. Pitt has a very nice turn as Ben Rickert, a guy who made a fortune, turned his back on Wall Street and retired to Boulder.

A couple of newbies (Finn Wittrock and John Magaro) discover that they'd be smart to bet against all the phony/baloney mortgages. They convince the reclusive Rickert to help them move from the kids' table to the one where the high rollers sit.

Pitt's Rickert believes this duo, which sometimes provides straight-ahead comic relief, but he also tries to educate them: If they win, the world loses.

And, yes, before it's done, The Big Short reminds us that ordinary people suffered because of what the big boys did.

So don't bet against The Big Short. It's an exuberant, smart and pointed reminder that much of what we believe about the economy takes place in a world of smoke and mirrors.

When the smoke clears and the mirrors break, it's people like us who are left wondering what wrong. The Big Short wants us to know.

A funny, messy 'Anchorman 2'

If promotional effort counts, Will Ferrell deserves 2013's award for being the hardest working man in showbusiness.

In full Ron Burgundy regalia, Ferrell seems to have turned up everywhere. In some markets, willing news anchors have acted as if Ferrell's promotions are the funniest thing ever. To which I only can say, "Puh-leeze."

Not that Ferrell isn't funny: It's just that his Anchorman 2 promotional shtick wore me out.

Now, allow me to equivocate some more. There's little question that Ferrell's Ron Burgundy qualifies as a classic comic character, a self-absorbed anchorman who's as devoted to his hair as he is to the pursuit of truth, justice and the American way.

The original movie, a modest box-office success, has done landmark business in the secondary market. Excitement about the sequel, even though it arrives nine years after release of the original, is running high.

So what's the verdict?

Let me put it this way: Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues put me in mind of Charles Dickens's famous opening for A Tale of Two Cities: To paraphrase and perhaps overstate matters: Anchorman 2 is the best of comedies; it's also the worst of comedies. If you read a little further into Dickens' opening paragraph, you'll find this sentence, as well: "It was the age of foolishness."

If Anchorman 2 is representative of its time, we are indeed living in another age of foolishness. Unashamedly ridiculous, this sequel catches up with characters from the first installment some 10 years after we first met them.

Ron and his wife Victoria (Christina Applegate) are now a news team in New York City. When the anchor of the network evening news (Harrison Ford) cedes his job to Victoria, a jealous Ron goes into a tailspin, abandoning his wife and young son (Judah Nelson) and landing work as an announcer at San Diego's SeaWorld.

Ron's rescued from exile when an eager representative (Dylan Baker) of an emerging 24-hour news network invites him to gather his old team and become part of the fledgling GNN family.

This gives director Adam McKay, who wrote the screenplay with Ferrell, an opportunity to bring back the cast from the first installment: Paul Rudd returns as Brian Fantana, hard-partying investigative reporter; Steve Carell reprises his role as Brick Tamland, the world's weirdest weatherman; and David Koechner revives Champ Kind, America's crudest sportscaster.

Added to the mix are Kristen Wiig, as a weirdly intense love interest for Carell's Brick; Megan Good, as GNN's hard-charging boss; and James Marsden as Jack Lime, GNN's handsome anchor and network star.

While Lime headlines GNN's newscast, Burgundy and his cohorts are relegated to the 2 a.m. slot, which is about as close to prime time as Burgundy is to Edward R. Murrow.

But wait....

Burgundy regains prime-time exposure when he stumbles upon a rating-boosting formula, a mix of feel-good news and mindless patriotism, all presented with Ferrell's masterful pomposity.

Setting the story during the period when non-stop news was born gives Ferrell and McKay an opportunity to add a bit of trenchancy to their comedy, serving up satire about the 24-hour news cycle and the vacuousness of so much of broadcast news.

It would be nearly impossible to sum up all the gags and sketchy plot lines in Anchorman 2, which survives a woeful beginning before providing its biggest laughs. It also would be unfair to reveal the many big-name cameos that are stuffed into the picture's finale. Discovering their presence is half the fun.

By the time, the end credits roll, you either will have submitted to the movie's unashamed foolishness or you'll have found the nearest exit.

If memory serves (and who knows about that), the approach here seems more scattershot than in the original, which also was directed by McKay. Anchorman 2 emerges as a disjointed collection of gags -- one involving a rescued shark, another mocking the over-produced oomph of summer movies, another reducing Ron to bawling infancy. The list goes on -- and then on some more.

You get the idea, when it's bad, Anchorman 2 falls flat; when it's good, it's a preposterously silly look at ... well ... I'm not entirely sure what.

Still, I laughed enough to leave the theater with a smile on my face or maybe it was a half smile, inspired partly by my puzzlement at the hit-and-miss quality of the whole affair and partly by the bits I found too funny to resist.

He comes of age in a water park

I recall reading somewhere that a single caring adult can alter the whole trajectory of a kid's life, particularly if that adult shows up at a critical point in a young person's development.

I thought about that while watching The Way, Way Back, a comedy about a dejected, angry teen-ager who blossoms under the mentorship of the owner of a Massachusetts water park called Water Wizz.

Fourteen-year-old Duncan (Liam James) seems entirely uncomfortable in the world until he meets Owen (Sam Rockwell), an adult who senses the boy's loneliness and encourages him have a little fun.

For Duncan, loosening-up is no easy task. He's stuck on a month-long beach vacation with his divorced mother (Toni Collette) and the new man in her life (Steve Carell). To make matters even worse, Carell's Trent and Collette's Pam are in the early stages of their relationship and have yet to settle important territorial issues.

Just to add a little more insult to the already festering pile of Duncan's injuries, Trent's daugther (Zoe Levin) is a stuck-up, socially conscious teen who's totally condescending toward the dweebish Duncan -- at least when she's not entirely indifferent toward what she perceives as his worthless existence.

Directed and written by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash -- actors and screenwriters who won an Oscar for adapting The Descendants for the screen -- The Way, Way Back can't entirely overcome the familiarity of what amounts to yet another teen reclamation project. But the movie offers interesting wrinkles en route to a predictable -- if slightly attenuated -- finale.

To begin with, The Way, Way Back allows Carell to play to a jerk. Carell's Trent declares his jerkhood from the movie's outset, and does little to change our opinion of him as the story develops.

In Pam, Trent seems to have found a woman so desperate to hold onto a potentially stable relationship that she'll put up with a lot. Trent seems more than willing to take advantage of the situation. He shows far more interest in socializing with another couple (Rob Corddry and Amanda Peet) than in testing the waters of stepfatherhood -- or even in spending time with Pam.

Duncan's shot at self-affirmation arrives in the form of Rockwell's Owen, who becomes a kind of surrogate father for Owen. Not only does Owen offer Duncan a job at Water Wizz, he knows how to relate to a kid, in part because he still is one. In a way, the movie is Owen's coming-of-age story, too.

The cast is further bolstered by Allison Janney, who plays Trent's garrulous neighbor and Anna Sophia Robb, who appears as Janney's daughter, a girl who's smart enough to take an interest in the dejected Duncan, who suffers one indignity after another. An example: He's forced to explore the beachfront Massachusetts town where the story unfolds on a pink girls' bicycle he finds in Trent's garage.

Maya Rudloph appears as one of Sam's employees, and both Faxon and Rash play small roles as water-park workers.

To their credit, Faxon and Rash provide some shading, even for the dislikable Trent, and they belatedly give Collette a chance to dig more deeply into a character with an alarming tendency toward over-dependence.

For all of this, The Way, Way Back may leave you shrugging, perhaps because we've been down this road too many times, perhaps because the movie tends to be a bit bland and perhaps because the adult conflicts -- though sketchily presented -- are more interesting than Duncan's problems.

Let me backtrack a bit, though. It's convenient, but a little inaccurate to classify The Way, Way Back as a coming-of-age story. In truth, neither the movie's teens nor its adults fully mature.

Rather, they're brought to the brink of important life changes. Faxon and Rash keep the movie's ending upbeat, but allow us just enough room to speculate about whether these characters really will be able to sustain new and better versions of themselves.

Magical? Not really. Funny? Often

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone conjures up laughs.
Silly, sloppy and totally lacking in trenchancy, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone has something richer comedies often lack -- a decent supply of laughs.

Steve Carell joins forces with Steve Buscemi, Jim Carrey, Alan Arkin and James Gandolfini for a comedy about a couple of fading magicians (Carell and Buscemi) who have overstayed their welcome as Las Vegas headliners.
In their prime, Burt Wonderstone (Carell) and Anton Marvelton (Buscemi) were good enough to have a hotel theater named for them, but they've stagnated: Their act hasn't changed in years.

The movie opens with a nice little prologue in which two geeky elementary school kids form an alliance built around magic. It all starts when young Burt is given a magic set for his birthday. Rance Holloway's Magic Kit transforms his life, stimulating him to learn a variety of rudimentary tricks. He thinks magic will enhance his popularity.

Burt and Anton grow up to conquer Las Vegas, where they work for a hotel owned by Gandolfini's Doug Munny, whose name signals his undisguised capacity for greed.

Director Don Scardino (of 30 Rock fame) may not be the greatest of stylists, but what he lacks in visual chops, he makes up for by giving the movie an affable and sometimes dippy spirit.

The story's principal development involves the introduction of another magician, Carrey's Steve Gray. Gray, who becomes an instant rival for Burt and Anton, doesn't exactly do magic tricks. Rather than creating illusions, he puts himself through a series of physical tortures -- like spending a night screaming on a hot bed of coals. He's his own reality show.

The complex illusions cooked up by Burt and Anton seem passe when compared to Gray's death-defying stunts, which -- the movie suggests -- are precisely what a thrill-hungry public craves.

A bewigged Carrey -- he looks a little like Fabio on a bad day -- brings his customary intensity to the role of a crazed performer; it's a one-note performance, but the note is so strikingly manic, it almost sustains itself for the entire movie.

The script may be trying to for a bit of satirical edge with Carrey's character, but members of the pretension police can relax: No one's likely to accuse The Incredible Burt Wonderstone of trying to make any kind of statement.

Carell begins the movie as a self-absorbed, womanizing egoist with long hair, the biggest bed in Vegas, a tan that looks as if it came out of a bottle and an act so transparently showy, it borders on self-parody. Carell smartly tones down his performance as the movie progresses, bringing a little normalcy (and a better haircut) to his portrayal. He also picks up a love interest (Olivia Wilde) along the way.

Buscemi mostly plays second fiddle to Carell as the beleaguered Anton. Not surprisingly, the partnership between Burt and Anton becomes increasingly shaky, slipping into its final collapse with a disastrous trick called "The Hot Box." Eager to compete with Gray, the two suspend themselves in a class cage and wait for the Vegas sun to fry their brains.

Once he's on his own, Burt's career founders. He's eventually reduced to working assisted living facilities. At one such facility, he meets the aging Rance, who long ago abandoned his career as a magician. Burt and Rance develop a friendship that helps revive both their spirits.

It hardly needs to be said that Arkin fulfills his comic obligations with sarcasm, rue and what -- in this movie -- passes for wisdom.

The movie doesn't do much with other supporting characters. Jay Mohr (as the wonderfully named Rick the Implausible) adds little, to cite one example.

Of course, the movie builds toward the inevitable reunion and resurgence of the Wonderstone/Marvelton act, arriving at its destination in awkward but funny fashion.

It's possible that The Incredible Burt Wonderstone will become little more than a footnote in the careers of a lot of talented folks, but it's an amusing footnote -- and that counts for something.

Should this marriage be saved?

Tommy Lee Jones and Meryl Streep are unhappy together as a long-time husband and wife in Hope Springs.
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Hope Springs deals with a marriage that's foundering. I've seen the movie referred to as a "dramady," which means it's supposed to blend comedy and drama. I guess that's a fair description, but I wouldn't call Hope Springs great drama or sharp-edged comedy. Mostly, the movie stands out for being an adult-oriented movie that arrives in the middle of a comic-book summer and for being willing to show aging characters talking -- albeit awkwardly -- about sex.

Nothing dramatic happens to bring this marriage to the brink, which is more or less the point. Hope Springs has more to do with the deadening accrual of habit than with rash infidelities or Virginia Woolf-style knock-down drag-outs.

Initially, I wondered whether Tommy Lee Jones, an actor who can seem as angry as a clenched fist, would team well with Meryl Streep, an actress who excels at both drama and comedy. I'm not sure I ever bought them as a couple, but I watched with interest as they worked over material that vacillates between compelling and second-rate.

Here's the drill: Kay (Streep) and Arnold (Jones) have been married for 31 years. Five years before we meet them, Arnold hurt his back and began sleeping in the guest room. He never returned to the bedroom he and Kay once shared. Arnold's an accountant. Kay works in a clothing store. And if you happened to meet them in real life, you'd probably think they were as happy as most other couples in Omaha, which is where they live.

Kay knows differently. She's not content, even if Arnold is comfortable in the rut he's dug for himself. He goes to the office. He comes home. He eats dinner. He falls asleep in front of the TV while watching the golf channel.

In a bold move, Kay enrolls in a $4,000 intensive marriage counseling session in Maine. These sessions are conducted by Bernie Feld (Steve Carell), a psychologist who has written a best-selling book called You Can Have the Marriage You Want, the title of which pretty much explains what it's about.

Predictably, Arnold has no interest in therapy. When he realizes that he either must accompany Kay to Maine or give up on his marriage, he boards a plane -- not that he quits complaining. Counseling won't do any good. The psychologist's a fraud. The whole thing costs too much.

I've got two views about Hope Springs, which was written by Vanessa Taylor and directed by David Frankel, who also directed Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. There's an undeniable element of daring here, particularly in the therapy scenes, which -- in fairly short order -- address Kay and Arnold's badly depleted sex life.

At its best, the movie plays like a less taxing version HBO's In Treatment, and I half wondered why Carell had usurped Gabriel Byrne's role as one of entertainment's more credible shrinks.

To the movie's credit, therapy isn't shown as an instant cure-all. For Arnold and Kay, therapy is full of bumps, detours, bruised feelings and anger.

Carell plays his role straight in a movie that finds its best moments in his character's office. Frankel's few attempts to open things up can seem superfluous. An example: Kay visits a local bar where she encounters a sympathetic bar tender (Elizabeth Shue).

I said I was of two minds about Hope Springs. Here's the second. I found it almost impossible not to be a little too aware of the acting. Jones gives Arnold the hunched posture of a man who's pushing through life. Arnold's running on residues of resolve and lowered expectations. Streep finds Kay's weariness, her yearning and also her tendency to be a little clueless at times.

The supposedly "humorous" parts of the movie aren't all that funny, although the trailer seems designed to persuade us that Hope Springs is a comedy.

So what am I saying? Although parts of Hope Springs are commendable, I didn't totally buy Taylor and Frankel's exploration of the calcifications that can be wrought by age, habit and lack of imagination. I wish the movie had been a little tougher.

So I'll split the difference. Yes, it's refreshing to see a movie that deals with adult themes. But Arnold and Kay's troubled marriage finds itself in the middle of a movie that seems to want to explore real issues, but -- in the end -- doesn't want to ruffle too many feathers, even those belonging to Arnold and Kay.

Romance at the end of the world

Steve Carell and Keira Knightley eventually create some chemistry on the road to oblivion.

Do filmmakers know something we don't? I ask this because of late we've seen several end-of-the-world films. Lars von Trier's Melancholia and Abel Ferrara's 4:44 Last Day on Earth top the most recent list. Before that, we saw a big-screen adaptation of Cormack McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, and long before that On the Beach, director Stanley Kramer's earnest 1959 cautionary tale about the dangers of nuclear warfare.

Genre fans can make their own lists, but one thing's clear: Hollywood has an on-again, off-again love affair with the demise of absolutely everything.

Now comes Seeking a Friend For the End of the World, a tonally addled movie that can't seem to decide whether it's a biting black comedy, an offbeat romantic comedy or a drama about the virtues of reconciliation and love. Seeking a Friend, which stars Steve Carell and Keira Knightley, winds up being all of those things and none of them, a curious hybrid of a movie that never quite finds a believable niche.

In the early going, Seeking a Friend threatens to ignite a spark of genius. Carell plays Dodge, an insurance agent. For Dodge, the approaching Doomsday feels like a form of cosmic piling-on. Dodge's wife has decided to leave him rather than spend her last days in his company. He has no luck finding solace among his friends, either. They all seem to have taken to shooting heroin and indulging their libidos.

At a party, one of those friends (Patton Oswalt) finds the proverbial silver lining in this gargantuan cloud. With the end fast approaching, women have become far less discriminating, he says. His final days have turned into an impromptu orgy, fulfillment of a macabre but still welcome (at last to him) dream. To Dodge, everything seems futile.

Alone and depressed, Dodge eventually is thrown into contact with a flighty young neighbor with an affinity for vinyl records (Knightley's Penny) and the boyfriend (Adam Brody) that the script quickly sheds. At that point, first-time director Lorene Scafaria holsters most of her satirical guns and tries on a variety of road movie ploys.

Dodge and Penny flee a riot-plagued New York City, he in hopes of contacting an old high-school girlfriend, she because Dodge promises to help locate a pilot who'll be willing to fly her to Britain to spend her last days with her family.

Along the way, our mismatched couple runs into William Petersen (as a man who has hired someone to assassinate him so that he at least won't know when the end is coming) and Derek Luke (as a former boyfriend of Penny, a survivalist who thinks he can out-macho the apocalypse).

If there's a comic high point in Dodge and Penny's road-warrior adventures, it arrives when they stop at Friendsy's, a restaurant where a giddy staff has become helpful in a nearly berserk sort of way that parodies a variety of well-known eateries.

But Seeking a Friend lacks the fortitude to laugh all the way to oblivion.

Late in the proceedings, Dodge takes Penny to meet his father (Martin Sheen), a man he hasn't seen in years. As fortune and script contrivance would have it, Sheen's Frank is a pilot with his own plane. But before any trans-Atlantic travel can be discussed, Dodge must vent a bit about the father who left home when he was still a kid, and Sheen must slip into apologetic mode.

As the depressive Dodge, Carell can be a little bland, and Knightley works her character's eccentricity as hard as she can, but Carell and Knightley deserve credit for increasing their chemistry quotient as the movie progresses.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World has its comic moments and also a few that prove touching, but here's another movie that asks us to chew on scraps of satisfaction rather than savor an entire meal. Moreover, the movie's lachrymose undertow doesn't always make it easy to take.

And what's up with all these end-of-the-world fantasies anyway? There's an almost sickening indulgence to these movies as if an aging baby-boom generation can't imagine that life will go on without it. As I dipped in and out of the various moods of Seeking a Friend, I began to miss the uncompromising satire of bravura end-of-the world movies such as Dr. Strangelove.

In that classic, we were stupid enough to destroy ourselves. These days we seem content to fantasize about the end of a bland run caused by some sort of cosmic collision which feels more like the cancellation of a forgettable TV series than the apocalyptic conclusion of ... well ... everything.

Oh well, there's one truly great thing about end-of-the-world movies. No matter how much we might crave second helpings, they don't allow for sequels.

A sad-sack loses his soul mate

Steve Carell joined by a talented cast in Crazy, Stupid, Love

Steve Carell looks like a guy many of us might have gone to school with at some point or other. Carell, who made his big-screen breakthrough in 2005's The 40-Year-Old Virgin, is neither impossibly handsome nor off-puttingly strange? His movie characters sometimes have a sad-sack quality, but can seem entirely normal -- in a middle-of-the-road sort of way. Not a comic who likes to poke a finger in anyone's eye, Carell wouldn't seem out of place on line at a Home Depot store.

An improbable leading man, Carell's comic skills nonetheless have made him a headliner, and his latest comedy -- Crazy, Stupid, Love -- surrounds him with a moderately successful mixture of relationship issues, rom-com cliches and better-than-average farce.

In Crazy, Stupid, Love Carell plays Cal, a married man whose wife (Julianne Moore) tells him she wants a divorce. After a 25-year-marriage that began with a middle-school romance, Cal and Moore's Emily probably are together more out of habit than love. To seal the divorce deal, Emily confesses to an affair with one of her office mates, an accountant played by Kevin Bacon.

Once rejected, Cal slips into full-blown depression. He also becomes an unlikely regular at an upscale singles bar, where he's the proverbial fish out of bottled water. At the bar, Cal meets Jacob (Ryan Gosling), a slick womanizer who decides to give Cal a makeover. Jacob wants to turn Cal into a mirror image of himself, a smooth operator and certified play-ah. This is what's known in the trade as a necessary contrivance, a development that allows the movie to continue and gets Hal off his bar stool.

Crazy, Stupid, Love is a movie composed of meanwhiles, perhaps too many of them. Cal emerges as a love machine, and his eighth-grade son (Jonah Bobo) falls for his baby sitter (Analeigh Tipton), a girl who's four years ahead of him in school. Bobo's Robbie embodies the movie's major theme, which has to do with finding one's soul mate and pursuing him or her without fear of appearing either crazy or stupid.

In yet another "meanwhile," a young woman (Emma Stone)* rebuffs Jacob's advances; she's busy studying for her bar exam. But when Stone's Hannah is slighted by an attorney (Josh Groban) she assumes has fallen for her, she seeks out Jacob in what amounts to an expression of defiance and anger. Of course, Stone's Hannah falls for Jacob, and, of course, he suddenly realizes that there's more to life than sexual conquest. He's in love, too.

Jacob and Hannah close their love deal in a very amusing comic scene that pokes well-deserved ridicule at the final dance sequence of Dirty Dancing with its Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes rendition of Time of My Life. Last seen in the gritty Blue Valentine, the talented Gosling avoids turning Jacob into a caricature. Moore seems a little worn out in an underdeveloped role. An outgoing Stone, with her "I'll-try-anything" attitude, plays well against Gosling's cool.

I laughed at Marisa Tomei's increasingly broad portrayal of the teacher who becomes Cal's first conquest, and who lives to regret it.

Directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (I Love You Phillip Morris) work their way (not always successfully) through the variety of tones in Dan Fogelman's hit-and-miss screenplay. Still, a first-rate cast and a couple of well-staged comic high points push Crazy, Stupid, Love into the plus category. You'll have to make up your own mind about a sentimental, end-of-movie speech that threatens to turn Carell into the Jimmy Stewart of love.

Did it warm my heart? Not really. Carell and Moore never convinced me that they were soul mates. Still, when Crazy, Stupid, Love magnifies a comedy of misunderstanding into moments of giddy farce, it comes awfully close to fulfilling the whacky mandate of its title.

*When initially published,I incorrectly called Emma Stone, Emily Stone. My bad.

Chuckles minus a full course of laughs

Steve Carell proves endlessly perplexing to Paul Rudd.

For a country that routinely mocks all things French, it's ironic that the U.S. can't seem to get its fill of recycled French comedies. Dinner for Schmucks, which stars Steve Carell and Paul Rudd, supplies us with another instance in which Hollywood has sought inspiration from the country of liberty, equality and fraternity. This Americanized remake of Francis Veber's 1998's Dinner Game -- or Le Diner de Cons, if you must -- has its share of laughs, although it doesn't always serve them up by the forkful.

One way to judge a movie such as Dinner for Schmucks is by assessing how well it turns a crisp - though overrated -- French farce into an American comedy. How well does Dinner For Schmucks mix imagination, humor and slapstick before arriving at its inevitably sentimental conclusion?

As directed by Jay Roach (Meet the Parents and the Austin Powers movies), Dinner For Schmucks works well enough to deem the enterprise a modest success.

Rudd plays an aspiring executive who can land a much-desired promotion only by indulging his boss' wishes. The boss (Bruce Greenwood) hosts a monthly dinner to which his closest associates must bring a "schmuck," a hopelessly dorky and inept person whom the assembled execs can ridicule.

Carell plays the schmuck who holds the key to Rudd's success. Carell's Barry is an IRS worker and amateur taxidermist who, among other things, reconstructs great scenes from art using stuffed dead mice. One of his masterpieces: A precise replica of Da Vinci's The Last Supper.

The script contrives to have Barry meet Rudd's Tim in a way that sets up a dynamic of guilt. Tim runs Barry over with his car. Poor Barry. He's both hopeless and hapless, but a total lack of self-awareness makes him a good foil for Tim. Barry has no idea what an idiot he is.

The movie adds a variety of minor characters. Zach Galifianakis plays Barry's boss at the IRS, an eerily intense fellow who believes he can control the minds of others. Jermaine Clement has a truly funny turn as a self-involved artist and unashamed sex machine. Stephanie Szostak signs on as Tim's fiancee and conscience. Lucy Punch plays a libidinous woman who dated Tim once, but won't let go.

Carell's comic chops already have been established: He does as well as he can with a character who tends to be as annoying as he is funny. Rudd has the more difficult job of playing straight man; he handles it with reasonable aplomb.

The big dinner scene boasts bits that may be not be quite as funny in the execution as they were in the planning, but the characters we meet at this bizarre repast qualify as abundantly strange. Witness the ventriloquist who introduces his dummy (a blonde doll with exposed cleavage) as his wife.

I could have done without much of the slapstick, but I suppose that's a matter of taste. Considering that Dinner for Schmucks is a remake, I arrived at a preview screening with low expectations. I was pleased to find a few laughs and some strangely imaginative bits, and I suppose it takes a certain amount of admirable gall to include dead mice jokes in a comedy that's aiming at big-time summer success.

'Date Night?' Wish I'd been stood up

Maybe Steve Carell and Tina Fey shouldn't date.

-- The maitre'd at Claw, a trendy Manhattan seafood restaurant, seems dismissive of anyone who appears not to be wearing eau du A-List. Want to venture a guess about our host's sexual orientation?

-- A mob boss chomps away at his dinner in the back of Manhattan bar. His ethnicity?

-- During a perilous car chase, drivers and passengers open their mouths and do what?

If you require them - and I doubt that you do - the answers to these questions are a) gay b) Italian-American and c) scream.

Granted, I've cast my net far from the center of Date Night, a marriage comedy starring Steve Carell and Tina Fey. But it's at the periphery of this second-rate effort where you may first begin to notice that the filmmakers seem a little too eager to sacrifice their smarts on an altar piled high with everything from cartoonish gangsters to corrupt cops.

Director Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum) and screenwriter Josh Klausner seem to be betting - or so it seemed to me - that watching two supposedly "normal" people react to one extreme situation after another is justification enough for the movie's slapdash enthusiasms. If you're looking for insight into why marriages often slip into the doldrums, you might as well turn to Dr. Phil. Date Night doesn't have much to say about the subject, other than to point out that those who hop off the suburban treadmill, do so at their peril.

Look, Carell and Fey are too capable not to wring some laughs out of even second-rate material. But the movie's overall approach -- following one extreme situation with another -- results in a comedy of contrivances. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but in this case, it puts Carell and Fey into a tough spot: They must pit their comic instincts against an overpowering and not especially funny scenario in which anything that can go wrong does.

Like most comedies, Date Night would be lost without cliches. Carell's Phil works as an accountant. Fey's Claire sells real estate. They live in new Jersey with their two kids. Their lives consist of work, domestic chores, outings with the kids and the occasional book-club meeting. Even their weekly date nights have gone stale, carving yet another groove in the endless rut of their suburban lives.

One night Phil and Claire yield to something that seems to have become entirely foreign to them: impulse. The couple travels to a fancy Manhattan restaurant, the kind that has become so trendy most people make reservations six months in advance. With their romantic evening on the verge of collapse, Phil and Claire languish at the bar.

But wait.

An idea - not to mention the major plot twist - dawns. Phil and Claire commandeer the reservation of a couple that hasn't shown up. As those who've seen the trailer know, the couple Phil and Claire are impersonating has gotten crosswise with the mob, a situation that kicks our couple and the rest of the movie into a higher but far less savvy gear.

If you're old enough to remember The Out of Towners, a 1970 comedy starring Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis, you may want to think of Date Night as The Out of Towers with heavy artillery and an ear-splitting chase sequence. Phil and Claire face one potential catastrophe after another as they're dragged through the urban mud.

Sans shirt and looking buffed to the max, Mark Wahlberg turns up as a kind of private investigator who owns his own security company. The movie uses Wahlberg as a running, though increasingly tired, joke. Phil and Claire keep visiting the sleek bachelor pad where Wahlberg's character keeps his buxom girlfriend purring. He offers help in their night of desperation.

Date Night does an admirable job of disguising James Franco, who appears with Mila Kunis, as one member of the dopey duo who originally made the reservation at Claw. Ray Liotta plays a grim-faced mob boss, and Taraji P. Henson portrays a New York City detective who sides with our fleeing couple. Mark Ruffalo and Kristen Wiig are entirely wasted in early scenes that cast them as a couple fighting the monotony of marriage. They've decided to split.

Date Night isn't the first movie to try to stretch a one-joke premise into a full-length feature, but even at a crisp 88 minutes, it seems to run out of creative steam. I don't know what kind of prospects Date Night faces at the box office, but I'd say Hollywood owes Carell and Fey another - and much smarter - comedy. Us, too.