By Dan Htoo-Levine
Staff Writer

Since the days of Mel Brooks and Woody Allen, the comedy genre has lost integrity and originality. Its rebirth has been a long time coming. Like predecessors Anchorman, The 40 Year Old Virgin, and Superbad, Paul Rudd’s latest film Role Models is sure to restore any audience’s faith in funny movies.

Drawing elements from the cult sensation Clerks, Rudd plays a self-loathing pessimist named Danny, and Sean William-Scott portrays Wheeler, his party-loving, carefree counterpart. The two work together selling Minotaur, an energy drink, and giving anti-drug lectures to students. When Danny’s girlfriend, played by Elizabeth Banks, dumps him, he snaps on a tow-truck driver trying to impound his car, getting himself and his co-worker arrested.

Instead of going to prison, Danny and Wheeler are sentenced to 150 hours of community service at a big brother program, where they are paired up with Augie, a social outcast, and Ronnie, a wisecracking potty mouth. Though reluctant to work with Augie, Danny eventually warms up to him, while Wheeler and Ronnie quickly find a common interest in sexuality and the female anatomy. When the big brothers botch up their relationships with their “littles,” they have to choose between appearing in court, or repairing their friendships with the kids.

Although the plot line is cheesy and predictable in places, it is saturated with laughs. True to both Rudd and Scott’s brand of comedy, the film is wildly offensive and inappropriate. Although Bobb’e Thompson, the twelve-year-old actor who plays Ronnie, says some of the most outrageous lines in the movie, there is more to Role Models than shock-value comedy. Augie, played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse of Superbad fame, interjects an element of social comedy by making fun of the Dungeons and Dragons Tolkien-esque counterculture, while his parents are a caricature of a typical middle class-American family.

Heartwarming and offensive, predictable and in certain spots unexpected, Role Models hardly breaks new ground, but comes at a new golden age of cinematic comedy. Although it won’t be remembered as a classic, it is an energetic hour and a half of laughs that keeps audiences enthralled.