When Steve Carell showed up as mentally deficient weatherman Brick Tamland in Will Ferrell’s “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” last summer, fans of the Daily Show correspondent experienced an uncensored taste of his comedic insanity and genius drop-dead-pan delivery.
This summer Carell stars in and co-wrote, with director/producer/writer Judd Apatow (“Freaks and Geeks,” “Ben Stiller Show”), “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” a comedy about, well, a 40-year-old virgin.
Writers Carell and Apatow revive and update the “let’s get the awkward guy laid” plot, but it’s thin and sometimes tedious, which leaves the viewer waiting for the next laugh rather than enjoying an engrossing plot in between chuckles.
Carell plays Andy Stitzer, a lonely electronics store salesman with no friends who long ago gave up trying to lose his virginity. Andy’s life is spent collecting original toy figurines, reading comics, playing video games and marching around his apartment alone practicing John Philip Sousa marches on his baritone horn.
“Anchorman” costar Paul Rudd, plays Andy’s broken-hearted and bizarrely pathetic coworker David. Short one player for a poker game and desperate David decides to ask Andy to join him and a few of the other employees for a couple of rounds in the electronics store after closing time.
During the course of the game the discussion gets around to the subject of sex and Andy’s obvious inability to describe his own freaky affairs immediately clues his poker buddies in to the fact that he is a virgin.
Andy’s new friends guide him through a plethora of social situations, which they promise will get him laid. Too shy and awkward, Andy fails at “sealing the deal” over and over again.
Though the plot is formulaic, and at some points trying, the jokes range from smart, bizarre cultural references, “Who frames an ‘Asia’ poster?”, to foul-mouthed physical gags like the chest waxing scene, not for the faint-hearted or hairy-chested.
Eventually the real love interest immerges in the form of Trish, Catherine Keener (Being John Malkovich), an attractive mother of three who owns a small business across from Andy’s electronics store.
Andy peruses her with all the standoff-ish and obsessive anguish of any 15-year-old boy trying to get a girls attention. The viewer squirming in their seats watching him call Trish for the first time.
The rest of the film sees Andy dancing around his secret and avoiding the intimate times with Trish like the plague.
There are sidesplitting gags and everyone involved from the stars to the people behind the scenes have created comedy gold in their previous endeavors, but this film, full of hilarity and heart, comes up short on story and tests the attention span.