No Wonder The Movie Industry Is Losing All Except Teenage Boys

Rating: 4/10 (20 August 2005)

Surely this movie after 15 minutes or so must become profoundly boring to genuine comedy lovers with minds characterized to any degree by mature interests. It's natural audience, I suspect, is horny teenage boys and those cheerleading, sentimentally romantic older critics eager at any cost for Hollywood this bad year to have a megahit. Scriptwriters Apatow and Carell appear to have had their comedic minds violated by a single idea, the notion of the necessary side-splitting hilariousness of a 40-year-old virgin and his buddies whose role it is to help him have first-time sex. Crude encounters and consistently crude language wholly lacking in requisite Aristophanic wit are certain to enrapture at least the aforementioned teenage boys. Two hours of this stuff for many other age groups turns the film into a hackwork exercise of non-incremental repetition. In a late effort, though, to please everyone, the scriptwriters shamelessly turn from gross farce to unlikely, essentially sentimental romance, combining jarring, disparate levels of reality in just the clumsy fashion of the comedic poetasters of old. Four stars out of ten in honor of Catherine Keener who is never bad, even in such drivel as this.