TRH Movie – You, Me and Dupree

So I went to a screening of You, Me and Dupree last night. Coasting off the glow of The Break-up and wondering how The Lake House even got made, I thought maybe, just maybe, this film might be a bit of funbadness. Boy, was I wrong. And, I should have known better.

First off, not a single person I knew wanted to go with me. Not one. And the one person I did find to go had to bail at the last minute because she had too much work to do—work was a better option than this movie. After seeing it, I can wholeheartedly agree.

I’m going to try not to include any spoilers, not that there’s anything to spoil in this damn film anyway, you can pretty much judge what’s going to happen from the trailer, but there are a couple of ‘twists’ on the genre that they attempt, which fall flat no matter how you look at it.

So, Molly (Kate Hudson) and Carl (Matt Dillon) are getting married in Hawaii. Oh, they are frolicking the beach. They are making gushy lovey faces at each other in the hotel room. They’re annoyed that a super-awesome Seth Rogan interrupts them to declare a “Dupree (Owen Wilson) emergency.” Apparently, the affable, lovable lunkhead landed on the wrong island. Oops. Yawn.

As Dupree sees that his best buddy, well into his thirties, I’ll add, has made the move from eternal fret boy to responsible adult, he kind of mourns the end to their freewheeling days of bachelorhood. This mode, quasi-hippie, no job, just ‘liven’ life’ is Dupree’s standard of living, which shortly gets on the stereotypical Molly’s nerves. Never in my life am I so disappointed in Hollywood as when it portrays marriage in the staid terms that it does: Molly gets upset at a boy’s night of them watching sports (whatever); Annie (Seth Rogan’s character’s wife) refuses to let him stay out past 9 PM; in fact, not a single woman in this film is something other than a ‘type’. Double yawn.

After the usual antics (Dupree has sex in their living room with a Mormon librarian, just him, an expensive leather couch and some butter, and then sets the house afire), the tables turn and it’s Molly who wants duper around. Of course, Carl gets jealous, and assumes that Dupree’s after his wife. This is the plot people. In the end, the grand blessing of dipper’s giant heart ends up making everyone happy. Triple yawn.

Everyone else in the theatre laughed. And granted, I cracked a smile a couple of Owen Wilson’s prat falls, but the spice of a movie like Wedding Crashers just isn’t here because there’s nothing new. And despite my old-man crush on Michael Douglas (love him for some reason, I can’t explain it), I feel bad that he’s relegated to these silly roles. In the end, I’m still dying to see a good, no, make that great, summer movie, and Superman Returns sure as hell wasn’t it either.