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'Role' funny film of Big Brothers, small minds

The scruffy comedy "Role Models" gets a nice boost from the buddy-movie casting of Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott.

The scruffy comedy "Role Models" gets a nice boost from the buddy-movie casting of Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott.

On the one hand, you've got Rudd, the laid-back smart guy who takes everything in, processes it, then lets go with a ticker-tape of off-hand wisecracks.

One the other you've got Scott, the hyper-active guy with the arrowhead face who's oblivious to everything, and unironically committed to an agenda of girls, money, sex, beer.

They have the right screen chemistry for "Role Models," as energy-drink salesmen who have a bad day at the office that turns into a police incident and 200 hours of community service.

They end up in a Big Brother program, where Rudd is sentenced to befriend a nerdy teen (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) who avoids his horrifying parents by immersing himself in a medieval fantasy role-play world.

Scott's character, meanwhile, is assigned to mentor an angry, fatherless South Central kid prone to obscene language and accusations of sex abuse.

These relationships are initially contentious, ultimately redemptive (careful, though, this movie is not for kids). It's predictable but it's also funny, abetted by the benefits that accrue when the right actor finds the right role. (Mintz Plasse, from "Superbad," is delightfully at home in the Dungeons and Dragons world.)

Director David Wain comes from an absurdist, sketch-comedy background, but he does a nice job here managing a straight-studio premise that could have gotten out of hand - it's a buddy movie with at least four buddies. He glues the stories together by casting reliably funny Jane Lynch as the Big Brother program director, periodically calling Rudd and Scott on the carpet.

Not everything works. There is the over-arching story of Rudd's deteriorating relatationship with his girlfriend (Elizabeth Banks), probably the movie's least successful facet, but not a big deal in the scheme of things, and it's nice to see Banks kiss someone who is not Seth Rogen. *

Produced by Luke Greenfield, Mary Parent, Matthew Seigel and Scott Stuber, directed by David Wain, written by Paul Rudd, David Wain, Ken Marino and Timothy Dowling, music by Craig Wedren, distributed by Universal Studios.