You, Me & Dupree

From ‘Shanghai Noon’ to ‘Starsky & Hutch’ and ‘The Wedding Crashers’, Owen Wilson’s nonchalant, funny-without-ever-sweating-it comic persona is frequently the foil for a contrasting screen partner, but he’s always been such a delight that it’s no surprise to see him in a vehicle of his own. Unless, that is, you’re the filmmakers behind this intermittently amusing fluff, who probably didn’t set out to showcase Wilson; but in a movie where the rest of the material proves underwhelming, there’s no mistaking where the action is.The ‘You, Me’ part involves newlyweds Kate Hudson and Matt Dillon, who are having a hard time settling into married life thanks to her dad Michael Douglas, a greedy property developer who’s also Dillon’s boss. Frankly, it’s a bit dull, since Dillon’s constrained playing the straight guy, Hudson has little to work with, and Douglas looks bored. The ‘Dupree’ part is thankfully much more entertaining, since that’s where Wilson comes in as Dillon’s lovable doofus of a buddy who loses his job when he goes to the wedding and thus ends up on the happy couple’s sofa. It’s ‘just for a coupla days’, of course, but we all know where that’s going, and soon masturbation gags, a blocked loo, strained friendships and fire damage are the order of the day. Predictable, yes, but diverting enough when Wilson’s on screen doing his half-pixie, half-surfdude routine, even making sense of the script’s rather forced arc from anarchic anti-nesting nuisance to empowering anti-establishment spirit. We smile – though in our hearts we know it’s not quite enough to carry the picture unaided.