Although “I Love You, Man” isn’t technically from the Judd Apatow line of movies about boy-men who male-bond, it’s still a “bromedy” with recognizable Apatow traits.
For one thing, it stars Paul Rudd, that tireless and reliably funny supporting player of many an Apatow film. The strained premise of “I Love You, Man” is that Peter (Rudd) is a regular guy, on the verge of marriage, who never made a male friendship significant enough to qualify as a best man at the wedding.
It’s explained that Peter has always had a girlfriend, has long been in touch with his feminine side and didn’t develop the manly arts of cigar-smoking, playing air guitar or drinking till you puke.
Clearly, he needs to find someone before the ceremony. And the false starts are among the film’s funniest sequences.
Finally he befriends Sydney (Jason Segel), a disheveled schlub who seems to float through life with all his male needs indulged. Sydney has a “man cave,” where he and Peter can retreat for beer and rock ‘n’ roll.
No surprises are in store along the way: Some hackneyed misunderstandings provide excuses for tension between the two new buds, as well as between Peter and his fiance (Rashida Jones).
The film is in a lower key than most of Apatow’s pictures, and is blessedly free of full-frontal male nudity (Segel’s unveiling in the Apatow-produced “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” was apparently enough of that).
Writer-director John Hamburg, who did the good “Safe Men” and the seriously not good “Along Came Polly,” clearly wants this to be a character comedy rather than a fall-down-laughing thing. It works, up to a point, largely because Paul Rudd has honed a certain kind of awkward, sincere American male, the kind of guy who’s really hopelessly geeky even though he can pass as a normal dude.
His attempts to invent slang, the better to fit into 21st-century culture, are especially good in their feebleness. These invariably come at the end of a sentence when Peter is trying to sound hip (Rudd has perfect pitch when it comes to such embarrassments).
Jason Segel, in the role that might’ve been ideal for the slouching young Bill Murray, doesn’t quite nail it. But that may be because everybody involved wanted to play the reality of the relationship rather than the comedy. Because if there’s anything we’ve learned from the Apatow school, it’s that teary-eyed male bonding trumps comedy every time.
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