Dullish collage of comic incidents.

Rating: 3/10 (18 February 2009)

This film is reasonably highly rated by users here so I obviously missed something because it seemed patched together out of semi-independent events that were designed to be amusing but, to me, were for the most part pointless and unfunny.
This nebbish who writes the score for a TV crime series (Jason Segel) is dumped by his hoarse-voiced petite blond girl friend Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell), an actress on the show, and runs away to Hawaii to forget her. However, Bell shows up coincidentally at the same time and hotel, and with her new boyfriend, an English musician, Russell Brand. Segel keeps running into the pair each time he has dinner, drinks, surfs, takes yoga classes, or just walks around. He also meets a handful of weird, vaguely new-agey characters who use words like "totally" and say things like, "There's pain behind those eyes." In the end, Bell and Brand break up. Bell wants to get it on again with Segel but he rejects her and goes back to Los Angeles. The end.
I think what this film is trying to be is a refurbished "There's Something About Mary," although if you shook its family tree, "Ten" might fall out of it. Example: After being jilted, Segel bawls abjectly, like an infant, in a public place, just like the protagonist of "There's Something About Mary." But all the incidents take place in an exotic beach setting, as in "Ten." The difference is that "There's Something About Mary" had a plot that developed, that led somewhere. One incident followed and depended upon some previous incident, and the story thickened. Another example: The TV show that Segel and Bell work for is canceled. And nothing happens. It leads nowhere, a dead end that simply fills up a bit of screen time. The impression left by "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" is that of a padded-out episode from a situation comedy.
In "There's Something About Mary" we are interested in seeing what devious surprise lurks around the next corner. In "Ten", the purpose of the film was to show us that when a middle-aged man tries to overcome his fear of maturity, it can work, though it may involve effort, pain, and humiliation. Here, I couldn't bring myself to be interested in what happened to any of the characters.
It all seemed pointless, unless the point was to cash in on the success of the earlier comedies. There is a five-minute scene in a yoga class. Everyone else in the class is able to assume the positions with ease, but Segel has to struggle to do, say, a tripod handstand, though he succeeds in the end. So? Best performances in the sense that they were least abrasive: Segel and Rand. Segel is flabby and giddy, one foot in some other self-obsessed dimension, like a half-gassed Judge Reinhold. Rand gives us a nicely honed portrait of a hairy, tattooed bloke who is a paragon of good will.
The version I saw was unrated but it's hard to imagine why. It's hardly erotic. There is some male nudity which, I admit, I found gratuitous and objectionable. I wouldn't have found female nudity gratuitous and objectionable though.
I'd advise a pass on this one, despite its overall good ratings. If you are the sort who would find this amusing, then you might want not only to forget Sarah Marshall but to ablate her entirely and go directly to the sources, "There's Something About Mary" and "Ten." Why settle for this pinchbeck ripoff?