could have been a whole lot funnier

Rating: 6/10 (7 May 2006)

"The 40-Year Old Virgin" wins the award for being the dirtiest, most foulmouthed version of "Pygmalion" this side of "My Bare Lady." As the title explicitly states, this is the story of a man who has somehow managed to avoid having sex for the first four decades of his life, and the attempts on the part of his co-workers to see that he doesn't make it five. Thus, once they get over the shock of Andy Stitzer's little secret, these helpful buddies spend the remainder of the movie coaching and grooming him in the fine art of sexual conquest and romantic seduction.
The problem with "The 40-Year Old Virgin" is that it can't decide whether it wants to be a crude, gross-out raunch-fest or a sweet, warmhearted romantic comedy. By trying to succeed at both, it manages to succeed at neither. For all the filmmakers' attempts to meld them, the two very different halves just keep canceling one another out.
Yet, as with any film that aspires to make us laugh, "Virgin" must finally be adjudged a success or failure based not on how wild or tame it is, but on how funny. And, unfortunately, there just isn't very much humor to be found in this film, with the setups and jokes feeling mighty thin and painfully obvious for the most part, and the movie never seeming to know when to leave well enough alone. The "well enough" are the two lead performers - Steve Carell and Katherine Keener - who are both tremendously natural and likable performers and who could really make us care about their characters if the film weren't so cluttered with extraneous elements and subsidiary characters, and so tedious and drawn out in its execution. For, indeed, "Virgin" flies right in the face of that unwritten law of movie-making that decrees that no comedy should ever even approach a two-hour running time, let alone exceed it. Yet, clocking in at a whopping 128 minutes, the film begins to feel aimless and endless, with long stretches of time between all-too-infrequent laughs.