Very poorly written and poorly executed.

Rating: 4/10 (26 July 2008)

I can see how one or two of the jokes could've potentially been funny, but they must have been extinguished by the limp pacing and some genuinely bad acting. This movie has no energy. I won't go into the plot much because it just a very predictable Hollywood story. It is actually an extremely average romantic comedy in every respect (except for the male-genital exposure) but I had to take a star off of the rating because it is not so good on the technical side. The director, who has no other directing credits, managed to make a movie set in Hawaii with a good-sized budget that looks cheap. I've never noticed things like the direction or the editing in a comedy before but they stand out in a very bad way in "Forgetting Sarah Marshall."
I probably would have enjoyed it more if the characters had any charm. The movie expects you to feel sympathy for the main character, but it's never earned. He has a cozy job "composing" mood music for a TV cop show. In his spare time, he just lounges around doing nothing. His girlfriend is a TV star and he cries (quite literally) like a baby when she dumps him. I think the 40-year-old virgin had more testosterone than Jason Segel's character. Steve Carell was also likable and actually made you root for him. Watching Segel's self-loathing character mope around sadly when you know he's inevitably going to be with the beautiful Mila Kunis becomes tiresome. There are other obnoxious, unfunny characters. These are not people I would want to be stuck on a tropical island with...
...or even spend another 112 minutes with.