The crowd-pleasing new comedy Role
Models qualifies
as easily the most commercial project of David Wain's career, largely since the
rest of Wain's oddball post-State oeuvre (Wet Hot American Summer, The Ten,
Stella, the
clever online series Wainy Days) is defiantly, even perversely non-commercial. In Role Models,
Wain buys into the sturdy commercial formulas he's spent his career mocking,
but the results are so winning that they threaten to give selling out a good
name.
American Pie's Seann William Scott and
longtime Wain collaborator Paul Rudd (who also co-wrote the script) star as two
rudderless energy-drink pitchmen who are a study in contrasts: The sour,
sarcastic Rudd leads a joyless life, while Scott is an overgrown kid who seems
geeked to have a job where he can dress up in a ridiculous costume and ride
around in a sweet-ass truck. After an unfortunate series of events, Rudd
bottoms out by crashing a company vehicle. He and Scott are sentenced to mentor
young people, and paired with a sweet, geeky role-playing enthusiast (Superbad's Christopher
Mintz-Plasse) and a prepubescent troublemaker played with scene-stealing brio
by Bobb'e J. Thompson.
In its loose, ramshackle, gleefully profane
first half, Role Models suggests School Of Rock with Tourette's, or the original Bad
News Bears without
the baseball. Children plus bad behavior plus constant profanity proves a
winning combination. But in its inferior second half, the laughs subside and
valuable life lessons begin in earnest. The emotionally stunted men predictably
have much to learn from their youthful charges, but Rudd and Mintz-Plasse do a
good job of hitting the expected emotional beats without devolving into
sentimentality. It helps that Wain packs the films with pals and comic ringers
from the improv world, particularly the always-welcome Jane Lynch as the head
of the mentorship program; somehow, she manages to make helping troubled
youngsters seem much creepier than her constantly referenced past as a coke
fiend. It's another element that confirms Wain's ability to work within the
system without becoming a slave to it.