Is it a romantic comedy if the couple are already together, and nearly get murdered in the first reel? Maybe, but the movie to which I want to compare this is The Hangover, only with the raucous groomsmen replaced with Steve Carell and Tina Fey as the suburbanites who find trouble in the big city. And the city is Manhattan instead of Las Vegas. The similarity is that, like the Hangover guys, they plan a small adventure—dinner in town—and wind up causing a bizarre series events involving a police detective, a muscular guy, a fancy car, and more.
More to the point, it’s a comedy where the mistaken-identity plot hovers between the zany and the ridiculous, and, if you don’t mind that, it becomes as much a reason to watch the movie as the laughs. Carell and Fey have a nice chemistry, and after a few minutes where screenwriter Josh Klausner tosses out borderline clichés about men and women, the rest is all about marriage as a partnership, which is nice. Perfectly pitched (not overdone) is the husband’s antsiness at seeing his wife getting flirty with the muscle guy, a shirtless Mark Wahlberg. Given that they’re supposed to be regular folk, the story requires them to be way too brave and resourceful (e.g., way to adept at donning disguises and breaking and entering), but everything does fit together at least. Frizzy fun.
IMDB link
viewed 5/4/10 at Riverview and reviewed 5/5/10
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