CALL me sentimental, but can I just confess something to you guys? It’s just that I kind of have this soft spot for . . . misanthropes. Nothing quite sweetens my day like a little dose of bitterness.
In “Role Models,” Paul Rudd plays a guy who hates himself, his job, baristas and maybe his best friend (the underrated Seann William Scott). The two of them drive around to schools pitching auditoriums full of bored kids the idea that they should avoid drugs – and instead chug a highly addictive energy drink that is not at all like Red Bull. (It’s green, and its mascot is a minotaur, which is only half bull.) “We’re selling nuclear horse piss for six bucks a can,” about sums it up.
Worse: Danny (Rudd, who co-wrote the script with several others) has just hit his 10th anniversary on this job, he starts fights with people who say “ASAP” and his girlfriend (Elizabeth Banks, who is also in every other movie being released this fall) dumps him. Wheeler (Scott) boils down Danny’s personality to this: “I hate myself, yet I’m better than everyone.” Sounds like a cool guy.
In addition to being in a rut, thanks to a traffic altercation he’s also going to be in jail – unless he does community service mentoring little kids.
Enter McLovin. Christopher Mintz-Plasse of “Superbad” plays Danny’s little bro Augie Farks, a geek who spends his leisure hours obsessing over a role-playing swords-and-sorcery game that amounts to a medieval faire come to life.
Wheeler also has to participate in the same program, and is assigned to Ronnie, a foul-mouthed little black kid (Bobb’e J. Thompson) who immediately accuses Wheeler of grabbing “my joint.”
“I’m not really into the whole buddy-buddy, let’s go do stuff together sort of thing,” Danny says. So naturally there’s a camping trip and a medieval “battle royale” in which Danny is forced to learn how to work it 14th-century style, with tunics and broadswords and kneeling like a vassal before the king and “Bid him good morrow!” Danny takes the medieval name “Lunesta.”
Meanwhile, Wheeler teaches Ronnie an essential lesson about what we can all learn from KISS. Later, we’ll be treated to the second-best movie scene ever built around the KISS ballad “Beth” (the one in “Beautiful Girls” remains unsurpassed).
Despite its R rating, “Role Models” is basically a kids’ comedy for adults; Danny and Wheeler are just big goofy eighth-graders who drive a monster truck, ogle girls, make jokes, get called on the carpet by the principal-like weirdo (Jane Lynch) who runs the mentoring program and get upbraided by the mom-like Banks character.
The movie biz once recognized that nobody spews profanity like
grade-schoolers, and in the 1970s movies like “The Bad News Bears” were rated PG, a category currently reserved for movies like “Beverly Hills Chihuahua,” through which no adult should have to sit without unlimited access to intoxicating beverages.
“Role Models” isn’t a classic like “Superbad” or as hilarious as this summer’s “Step Brothers,” but it’s excellent fun for males in the mental age bracket of 14 to 22, which is most males.
It may alarm you to learn that despite the raunch, the gay jokes and the scene in which Wheeler advises little Ronnie how to use peripheral vision to check out the world’s supply of “boobies,” there might be some sort of message coming, but “Role Models” goes easy on the hugging and learning matrix. You stand a fair chance of emerging from the movie with your lack of faith in humanity unchallenged.
ROLE MODELS
Superbros.
Running time: 99 minutes. Rated R (profanity, nudity, drug reference). At the Lincoln Square, the 34th Street, the Orpheum, others.