At a time when it feels like every film released is simply joining onto the end of a line of anxious school children hoping to be picked for team “Oscars”, Role Models is like that weird kid standing alone with one finger up his nose and the other hand down his pants. Sure, he’s never going to make the team, but neither is half the other players desperately jostling for attention, so why worry about being selected when he’s already having a blast doing his own thing?
Fast forward to adulthood, slap on a MA rating, and that kid is now Role Models: a film that still proves to be a blast, so long as you’re willing to let your brain roll around in the gutter for 99 wickedly funny minutes.
Danny Donahue finds himself ‘in a rut’ when he realises he has wasted 10 years of his life in a dead end job that sees him market an energy drink to school kids. Things aren’t made any better when his long-time girlfriend Beth (Elizabeth Banks) decides to dump him and his sleazy work colleague Wheeler (Seann William Scott) is too busy being guided by his groin rather than his brain to care.
After overdosing on energy drink, Danny finally lashes out and crashes the company car into school property, landing himself and Wheeler with 150 hours of community service as punishment instead of going to jail. The two are assigned to serve their sentence as mentors in the Sturdy Wings programme, requiring them to befriend troubled children. Once they discover that the programme is helmed by a drug-rehabilitated nutcase (Jane Lynch), whom purposefully assigns them to the most difficult children on offer, jail starts to look like the easy way out.
Blatantly crass, outrageously vulgar and utterly stupid: If Seann William Scott’s filmography had a plot summary, this would be it. If the opening minutes of Role Models is any indication, where Scott whips out a dirty “your mum” joke to a group of school kids whilst wearing an absurd Minotaur costume, not much seems to have changed. That is, with the exception of one thing; it actually manages to be wildly funny.
So funny in fact, it’s almost suspicious. On paper, Role Models looks more like a dare someone gave screenwriter/director David Wain to see home many times he could get away with homosexual innuendo in a film. Yet remarkably each bottom feeding joke manages to be more side-splitting than the last, and it doesn’t cease until the credits start rolling. Maybe it’s due to Rudd’s perfect deadpan delivery or Scott’s vulgar yet oddly appealing frankness. Or maybe it has to do with surplus of amusingly wacky characters in support; especially Jane Lynch’s hilarious paraphrasing as the ex-coke addicted charity leader. Whatever the reason, the comedy in Role Models just works.
Even the two kids assigned to Danny and Wheeler are fantastically stereotypical: Ronnie’s (Bobb’e J. Thompson) a pint-sized version of Dave Chappelle, and Augie’s (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) the very definition of a nerd who takes part in live-action role playing games. As you would expect, the two “bigs” become quite fond of their assigned “smalls”, finding a connection either through their mutual love for the female anatomy or through a hope they can both win over the girl. It’s here where the film finds time to add a welcome touch of humanity, slightly taking away some of the guilt you have for laughing hysterically at the tremendously crude joke made just a moment earlier.
Conclusion:
Role Models might use an archaic formula to deliver to deliver racist, sexist and every other kind of derogatory joke possible, but it does so with a vibrant coat of undeniable wit and an added sparkle of humanity, ultimately making it more accomplished than most comedies of the last year. It’s just the kind of mindless fun needed to break up the endless line of Oscar-baited dramas this awards season.
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