Peter Klaven [Paul Rudd] has proposed to his girlfriend of eight months, Zooey [Rashida Jones], and she has accepted. With the wedding coming up it becomes evident that Peter doesn’t have any male friends and so he goes on the search for a ‘guy friend’. On this search he meets Sydney Fife [Jason Segel] and Peter’s first real male friendship begins.
The film comes from the writer of Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers, which are two comedies which for the time tried to toe the line between being a mainstream comedy and make the audience feel as awkward as possible. Here John Hamburg finally decides to go all out and discuss a topic that everyone already knows but never discusses because it’s not manly to talk about man problems. The film circles around the enigma that is man and man relations. To be honest there are no written rules as how to make friends, and at the same time there are so many things that people see as being too forward, so for Peter it is a ,mystery since he has never really had any friends that wasn’t a girlfriend.
When last did you meet a dude and think ‘that’s a cool dude’ and then wonder how you try to work out a way to meet up and hang out without sounding completely gay. I think that this is a really odd thing. The social rule book is really grey and therefore leaves it open to interpretation, but as I said no one wants to look gay or anything. So how does this relationship grow? It develops very awkwardly. Here is where the movie really blossoms. While these honest moments between Peter and Sydney feel somewhat genuine and funny at times at times it also feels too awkward to be funny. I think the awkwardness has more to do with Peter and Sydney’s characters rather than their platonic relationship.
The character of Peter Klaven is too much at times. His social retardedness brings me back to the epic speech that Robert Downey Jr. gave in Tropic Thunder about going ‘full retard’. I felt that the parts of the movie which didn’t work for me came from the purity of Peter’s character’s inability to connect with another guy and his ridiculous stereotypical female like tendencies. Peter loves Devil Wears Prada showing that he likes ridiculous chick flicks and knows how to make comfort drinks with chocolate candy straws. All of these things makes Peter into the woman’s wet dream, but at the same time a really odd thing since it’s more of a fantasy guy rather than a real person.
Sydney Fife on the other hand is almost the complete opposite of Peter. Sydney doesn’t want a committed relationship. He wants his space and ability to be a free man. He seems to prefer to hang out with his dude friends and at the same time the women are only allowed in the equation when he wants sex. However, the interesting part of the relationship shows up later in the film when we notice that Sydney needs this relationship even more than Peter does. We enter this movie assuming that Peter will be more or less using Sydney to complete some stupid ritual, but in the end Sydney is using him to redeem himself from all his other relationships that are failing due to his inability to grow up.
The overall question I have to ask myself is if I found this movie funny, and my response has to be sometimes. I would laugh here and then spend the next ten minutes waiting for the next laugh. The movie spent too long trying to making me feel uncomfortable and too little time making me laugh. However, at the same time I don’t think the movie was bad because it definitely does something special. So I think that this movie is a rental and something that you should check out for yourself to see if you love it or hate it. I personally think I have to see this again to make a for certain decision but for now it gets a passing grade.
IMDB says 7.8/10
Rotten Tomatoes says 82%
I say 6.0/10