Funny, stupid - everything you'd expect...

Rating: 7/10 (25 January 2006)

This was really good.
If you don't like vulgarity and you like your comedy to be sophisticated then don't watch this because it is way off on both those counts. A lot of the comedy is purile and stupid, but it still manages to be funny. A huge amount of the credit for that goes down to Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson: two naturally funny people who work extremely well together. You get the impression that a lot of the jokes came directly from them - or if not then the writer did a great job of judging the people they were writing for. It all feels very natural and that makes it very easy to laugh where you're supposed to laugh and cringe where you're supposed to cringe.
All the actors do a good job of playing the parts they were assigned and they've managed to squeeze a love story into this shameless smut vehicle without it getting too gooey and sentimental (which would have felt completely out of place).
I wasn't expecting too much, but I was most impressed. It's worth watching for Vaughn and Wilson alone. Without them playing those parts I suspect it wouldn't have worked, but it does - so who cares? It's a brazen, funny movie that knows exactly what it is and doesn't pretend to be anything else. Two thumbs up.