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What About Dupree? Meh.
Universal has sold You, Me and Dupree as this year’s Wedding Crashers. Unfortunately, the filmmakers only got the crash part right, so I’m divorcing myself from this aimless comedy.
Actually, since Owen Wilson plays a lovable misfit instead of the “nice� half of a duo, comparisons to The 40-Year-Old Virgin might be more appropriate. Call this one The 37-Year-Old Teenager.
Then again, that doesn’t work either, because You, Me and Dupree doesn’t have half the humor or heart that Virgin did. Dupree spends so much time aping other, better comedies, it’s a real Frankenstein monster of a movie. It’s like the filmmakers took pieces of Crashers, Virgin, What About Bob, Meet the Parents, Down and Out in Beverly Hills and others and clumsily sewed them together, but this mess never comes alive.
Wilson’s Dupree is one of those amiable schlubs who is impossible to completely dislike, even though he’s a perpetual screw-up. He’s the kind of guy who can’t find his way to a wedding in Hawaii because he forgets which island to go to. “Dupree was born on the wrong island,� complains his best friend Carl (Matt Dillon).
Dupree is Carl’s best man at his wedding to the lovely Molly (the lovely Kate Hudson), so when Dupree winds up homeless, Carl and Molly feel obliged to take him in.
Will Dupree make a mess of things? Does Owen Wilson like to talk in that laid-back drawl?
This timeworn scenario is so relentlessly predictable it’s literally not funny. Then the movie introduces Molly’s dad and Carl’s boss (Michael Douglas) as his nemesis, and that’s when the film truly flies off the tracks. I never bought into their disregard for each other, because it was based on stupid jokes like Douglas actually asking Dillon to get a vasectomy. The writing gets that desperate.
I was pleasantly surprised then, to see the film brighten in the middle because Molly sort of falls for Dupree unexpectedly, which works because Wilson and Hudson play off each other very well. Wilson does his utmost to make Dupree witty and zany, scoring a few offhand laughs, and Hudson radiates charm, even burdened with substandard material. The movie would have been much better had Hudson and Wilson been the married couple.
But then the film lurches back to the stupid battle of wits (or witlessness) between Dillon and Douglas and never recovers. The well runs so dry that writer Mike LeSieur or directors Anthony and Joe Russo throw in some off-the-wall references to the Martin Scorsese masterpieces Raging Bull and GoodFellas. The Russos even use the GoodFellas freeze-frame toward the end of the movie, never mind that it doesn’t belong there.
I’ve got yer GoodFellas reference, guys. Suddenly I find myself like Joe Pesci asking “How is this funny?�
Grade: C
