Movie Review: 'Our Idiot Brother' Forgets to be Funny

Here, right at the end of August, comes the most disjointed, discombobulated movie of the summer.

Our Idiot Brother wastes a cast of very talented comedic performers by giving them just about nothing funny to do and sticking them in a plot in which every character is a moron, a moral monster or both.

A super-dark indie family drama disguised as a comedy, the film borrows the plot of the far superior Paul Thomas Anderson/Adam Sandler movie Punch Drunk Love. A stoner hippie layabout (Paul Rudd) is the black sheep of a family that includes his three sisters (Zooey Deschanel, Emily Mortimer and Elizabeth Banks), and as they try to help him, his idiocy repeatedly gets in their way.

Deschanel and Rashida Jones play lovers, and the movie obeys the immutable Hollywood law that if there's a lesbian couple in a movie, one of them must have sex with a man before the film is over.

Mortimer is a Type A mother of two married to a despicable jerk of a documentary filmmaker (Steve Coogan), while Banks is a Vanity Fair writer working on her first big profile while navigating a platonic relationship with her neighbor (Adam Scott.)

So, so much goes wrong here. Not only are the film's many stoner jokes old, weak and toothless, but the movie isn't clear about what exactly is wrong with Rudd—is he perpetually stoned, or slow, or actually mentally handicapped in some way? Because for someone to walk in on two naked people and not put together that they're having sex, it would seem to favor the last of those.

The entire Vanity Fair plot hinges on Rudd refusing to help his sister commit an act of journalistic fraud—not out of principle, but because he's too stupid to know the difference. A similar problem befalls the Deschanel/Jones plot, which feels like a half-hearted sitcom adaptation of The Kids Are All Right. And don't even get me started on Jones' wardrobe—do lesbian lawyers really wear men's suits and ties to work?

Then there's a horribly repugnant scene in which the two other sisters try to convince Mortimer—depicted up to that point as a sweet, hard-working mother mistreated by a horrible spouse—that her husband's affair is her own fault because she's let herself become too ugly.

It plays like an amateur rewrite of the work of director Nicole Holofcener, who directed Mortimer in 2001's Lovely and Amazing. An early scene here is another knockoff of Mortimer's famous bedroom scene in that movie.

There are also subplots that go absolutely nowhere and are never in any way funny, from the theft of a dog to a kid's failed prep school interview. And if Banks' neighbor is too much of a dork for her to date him, why is he played by someone as handsome and cool as Adam Scott? And why is Scott introduced having sex with a beautiful woman? (Strangely, Rudd and "sister" Banks played a couple in Role Models, while he and Jones were married in I Love You, Man.)

There's a scene missing—the one where the three sisters realize that they've been too hard on their brother and that their problems aren't his fault at all, but rather of their own making. That never comes, and the movie doesn't even really have a third act, either. Each of the plot's problems is solved with single, deus ex machina lines of dialogue.

The film was directed by Jesse Peretz, whose past credits include the amusing 2001 movie The Chateau (also starring Rudd) and the abysmal, near-direct-to-DVD 2006 comedy The Ex. The film was written by his sister Evgenia—herself a Vanity Fair writer—and her husband David Schisgall.

I'd love to ask all of them a question: How in the world do you stick Paul Rudd, Steve Coogan, Adam Scott, Zooey Deschanel, Elizabeth Banks and Rashida Jones in a comedy and not come out of it laughing at all?

I'm also wondering if we should be worried about Rudd. Once that most dependable of comedic actors, he's on quite a troublesome streak of appearing in bad movies—Dinner For Schmucks, How Do You Know and now Our Idiot Brother—and being pretty bad in them.

Our Idiot Brother, directed by Jesse Peretz and starring Paul Rudd, Steve Coogan, Adam Scott, Zooey Deschanel, Elizabeth Banks, Emily Mortimer, and Rashida Jones. Rated R; 1 hour, 39 minutes.

Our Idiot Brother is now playing at:

• UA King Of Prussia Stadium 16 & IMAX, 300 Goddard Blvd., King of Prussia