Hola all. Massawyrm here.

You know, sometimes there are those movies that just don’t look particularly great yet somehow hit so close to home that you can’t wait to see them. There’s just something you identify with so closely that you want to laugh about it, you want to see how someone else handled the material that you, yourself, have lived through. Such was the case with You, Me and Dupree, the new Owen Wilson slacker/couch-surfing-with-the-married-buddy comedy. You see, I lived with Dupree. Only his name wasn’t Dupree. We called him Weasel.

Weasel is that friend. He’s a bit of a total fuckup. The guy you go out on a limb to get a job for only to have him lose it in under a week…due to missed shifts and tardiness…even though you live across the street from work. He’s the only guy I’ve ever known that has uttered the phrase Call 911…I’ll explain later and meant it. He’s the guy who will disappear to Wyoming for a year to ‘get his head together’ and not write or call until one Sunday at 9:30 in the morning the phone rings…and he’s at the bus station…and he needs someone to pick him up. Just don’t ask So dude, where are you staying? The answer will be That’s funny you should ask…

But I love the guy like a brother. Seriously. I always pick him up from the bus station, I always let him surf my couch and I know that one day I’ll get a call to bail him out of jail. And I will. We’ve lived together almost a half dozen times over the years, most of my best stories begin Well, one time me and Weasel…and he’s one of the handful of people who gave me the rather unfortunate moniker Massawyrm.

So the idea of a movie about Weasel, starring the guy I always pictured as playing him on film, living with his married friend (Weasel has surfed my couch many times since I’ve been married – fortunately my wife loves him almost as much as I do) appealed to me quite a bit. I know for a fact that the concept is rife with comedy, and I was dying to see what they did with it, what jokes I would identify with and laugh so hard that I’d cry at.

Unfortunately for me, the makers of You, Me and Dupree never met Weasel. They seem to have only heard stories. And apparently, they didn’t hear any of the good ones.

This is about as flaccid, anemic and poorly constructed as mainstream comedies get – suffering from no less than 6 fatal flaws in both concept and execution. Now, these are flaws that in and of themselves are enough to bitch about and can ruin a perfectly good film. But together they form an unstoppable force of tedium, ready and willing to tax every last bit of patience you can muster.

Fatal Flaw 1: The Mishmash. Rather than simply being a couch surfing comedy, it actually strives to take two different comic storylines and mash them together into one film, never really developing either to the extent they need. The other storyline, the one markedly absent from the trailer, is your typical overbearing father-in-law yarn. Don’t let the trailers mislead you, Owen Wilson isn’t the star of the film. Matt Dillon is. It’s the story of a guy dealing with his oafish best friend at home while juggling the antics of his evil Father-in-law boss at work. But as the film never quite decides which storyline is most important, it flitters back and forth, rarely giving either enough time to be interesting.

Fatal Flaw 2: You’ve seen it all before. Now when I saw you’ve seen it all before, I’m not just saying that there’s nothing new here conceptually. I’m saying that if you’ve so much as watched the trailer to this, you’ve actually seen every single stunt Dupree pulls in this film. Only shorter. From the looks of it, it is an unending stream of Owen Wilson bits, but really, there’s only a handful, and you’ve seen them. If the trailer made you want to see more of the bathroom gag, the HBO bit or any of the three “walking in on sex/masturbation” scenes, then you might enjoy this. If you were hoping for more than that, well, you’re SOL. That’s all you get.

Fatal Flaw 3: Who is this Dupree guy, anyway? Now I see what they were going for, I lived with it many times. And yet this film repeatedly fumbles trying to get across to the audience what they want Dupree to be. He’s the lovable oaf, yes. But he’s not actually stupid enough to be truly oafish – he’s simply a bit of a douche. And yet they try so hard to make him sweet and likable. So what you end up with is an inconsiderate sweet guy, who frankly isn’t the nightmare to live with the movie wants you to believe he is. He’s just a pain in the ass.

They never take him far enough into the realm of stupid, or blatant disregard or utter obnoxiousness to allow Wilson to be funny. They always seem to rein him in just as he’s about to go over the top. And rather than following the true mold of how these guys tend to operate –which is that they explain why there was nothing wrong with what whatever it is they did, using brick wall logic – he just apologizes. Sorry dude, my bad and then they move on.

It’s the nature of arguing with the brick wall logic that is supposed to fuel the tension that in turn fuels the humor. Owen Wilson is a MASTER of brick wall logic. He’s done it a dozen times in other films and people eat it up with a spoon. He sells faulty logic in a way that only he Jack Black and Jason Lee can. But they won’t let him do it here…because we’re supposed to like Dupree, but be frustrated by him at the same time. The result is that it’s never over the top enough to be zany and never “Oh that’s so true” enough to be funny for those who have been there, leaving it somewhere in a nebulous middle ground.

Fatal Flaw 4: The utter lack of communication. Now here’s where the film actually proves to be frustrating. Every bit of the father-in-law boss plot hinges on one crucial plot point – that Matt Dillon never, ever tells his wife what her father is doing to him. He’s constantly coming home late from work and she’s pissed about it. Meanwhile, her father is doing everything in his power to emasculate and humiliate him, while systematically trying to screw up their marriage. And Matt Dillon’s character never thinks to tell his wife “Look, your father is stressing me out. Would you believe what he said to me today?” No, instead, he keeps quiet about it and he gets more and more tense until the father’s not even remotely subtle plot begins to break up the marriage. And every single moment of that tension you sit there thinking talk to your fucking wife, dumbass. As a result it’s incredibly hard to ever feel for or identify with him. Come on, like there’s really a husband in existence who wouldn’t willingly sell his father-in-law up the river to get out of trouble, especially when it actually is his fault?

So why doesn’t he? Because this is a movie comprised of stock characters with off the rack motivations leading to paint by numbers reactions that just fall short of being Three’s Company thirty years too late. No, there is no secret hook as to why he can’t spill the beans. No one took the time to try to come up with one. And movies that hinge themselves so heavily on very easily solved problems aren’t very entertaining. They’re just annoying.

Fatal Flaw 5: Ain’t marriage great? You, Me and Dupree sure doesn’t seem to think so. Not until the sappy ending that is. Up until that point there is a series of “shrill harpy wife” jokes that showcase a very misogynistic ideal of marriage that thinks once married a woman will stop at nothing to make sure that a man can no longer do anything he once enjoyed doing. Now lets ignore for a moment the fact that this bit was growing old and stale with the invention of the phrase “Take my wife, please.” If that’s the humor they wanted to go with, great. Fine, whatever.

But then the film gets super cutesy with this all-we-need-is-love and “my wife is the most important thing in the world to me” razzamataz. But why is she so important? Fuck if I know. If I had to hazard guess it would be that she’s Kate Hudson and has an ass you can eat ice cream out of, but that’s the best I can fathom. So the movie builds from marriage sucks, marriage sucks, marriage sucks up to I love being married, without ever bothering to stop to explain why being married is such a good thing. It just is. Isn’t that sweet?

Fatal Flaw 6: The worst of it. Ultimately the biggest problem this film suffers is that it tries much harder to be a sweet, heart warming film than it ever tries to be a funny one. The result is that the jokes are few and far between as they focus more on the set up and ultimate redemption of Dupree. This leaves minutes between laughs. And I’m not talking about myself. I laughed once. The audience? They laughed a dozen to two dozen times, which seems like a lot, but isn’t. Not for a summer comedy, especially one so low brow. This kind of film should be cracking up the audience at least once a minute. This one clearly did not.

So is there anything I liked in this film? Nope. It’s pretty miserable overall. Hell, even Seth Rogen, who was in my opinion the best part of last years 40 Year Old Virgin, couldn’t get a laugh out of me. I swear to God, I honestly believe that this script was initially passed on by whatever producer this was first handed to. By page 28 he had to look up and say “This is crap. It’s a comedy that isn’t even remotely funny. Why the fuck did you hand this to me?” “Well, sir. Owen Wilson is attached to play Dupree.” “Owen Wilson huh? Yeah, he could make this funny.” Unfortunately, he couldn’t.

Sorry Weasel, maybe somebody will get you right next time.

Until next time friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em. I know I will.

Massawyrm

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