Raunchy Comedy with a heart.

Rating: 10/10 (22 August 2005)

Andy Stitzer (Steve Carrell) is living every guy's dream. His apartment is stocked full of action figures, hundreds of video games, posters... everything except his beautiful bisexual supermodel wife who enjoys playing games as much as he does, and his sports car. He's a virgin who rides a bike and lives alone.
He works at SmartTech, a spin off of stores such as Best Buy or Fry's. His coworkers in the stock room are David (Paul Rudd), Jay (Romany Malco), and Cal (Seth Rogen).
The four of them and Andy have very little in common. Andy's idea of an exciting weekend involves egg salad sandwiches in his apartment, and let's just say that the others have more interesting lives than that.
But now that they're in need of a fifth poker player for the game, they wonder if Andy would be a possible candidate. However, at this point, they see him as a mysterious guy and a potential serial killer. They grudgingly invite him to play with them, and he accepts.
As they guys exchange stories about their crazy sexual encounters and David starts obsessing about his ex-girlfriend Amy, all the guys start ragging on him, including Andy. At this point, he seems to be fitting in well enough, but the guys put him on the spot, making him tell a wild sex story.
He stumbles and bumbles, and ends up describing a woman's breasts as bags of sand. The other guys figure out he is a virgin, and decide to get to find a girl.
The relationship between Andy and his three friends is done amazingly well. I personally can relate to Andy. When I was in high school, my friends would often give me random dating advice and how to get with girls, etc. However what was funny, was that neither of them were any more experienced than me. I could totally relate to Andy when he got mad at his friends, and wondered if it was all a cruel joke. I too felt that way sometimes, when people would tell me i was a pimp or a ladies man when I had never been on a date. And they really did care about him, and are true friends, which made the movie all the better. It could have gone the other way, with at least one of them being a cruel prankster, but I was glad 40 year old virgin avoided having any real antagonist.
One amazing thing about this movie is that every character has a little bit of meaning and depth, and every actor is excellent. Wedding Crashers had a couple of characters that did nothing but provide cheap laughs. The homophobic racist grandma, Claire's evil boyfriend and Todd were all exploited for laughs and never really allowed to develop into anything. But EVERY character in 40 year old Virgin is important and allows the plot to develop further. There is no one that stops the scene or drags it with a poor performance that is played only for laughs.
In fact, this movie is so good that it could have been three separate movies, combined into one amazing cinematic performance. The three movies I speak of: 1. Guy has never had sex, friends want him to get laid - This part alone was funnier than similar movies like American Pie.
2. Guy/girl romance, break up, drama, issues, etc - Better than the formulaic movies that have come out like Must Love Dogs or All About Love... or most rom com.
3. Mother/daughters relationship - The relationship between Trish (Catherine Keener) and Marla (Kat Dennings) alone could have been a movie with Andy as a side character. this would have been a much better movie than The Perfect Man, mainly because the plot and characters and acting were much better. Plus, Dennings and Keener... much better looking than Duff and Locklear.
The main point is... this is the best movie since Spiderman 2, and the best comedy I have ever seen in my life. See it now, but see Wedding Crashers first. If you see this first you'll be disappointed in Wedding Crashers... see it first, love it, and then love this one more!