Four years after The 40-Year-Old Virgin put Judd Apatow (welcomely) on top of the comedic world, the style he’s popularized is starting to show its frayed edges. Granted, director/co-writer John Hamburg is only pretty tangentially related—a few Undeclared directing credits—and writer Larry Levin not at all—his biggest film credits thus far are  the two Doctor Dolittle films—but given that I Love You, Man is a film about male bonding starring Paul Rudd and Jason Segel, it’s fairly obvious what kind of tone this is going to take even before you see a trailer. 

 

That tone is pretty well summarized in Segel’s Sydney Fife, the man who would be Peter Klaven’s (Rudd) only real male friend: Sydney is a man-child to the point where he’s set up his garage into a “man cave” adolescent fantasy, complete with several TVs, a full band’s worth of instruments and a designated masturbating spot, humourously blunt about sex and treats women with passing interest at best—he actually meets Peter while cruising a real estate open house, which he cruises looking for divorcees, since they’re not really looking for anything serious. As Sydney and Peter’s friendship burgeons, they will share sweet-natured if crude good times, play with the boundaries of relationships, particularly male ones, and grow just enough to not be considered complete wash-ups. 

 

Now, obviously, that’s a formula that works, and you certainly won’t generally find me kvetching about an Apatow-style comedy, but narrative comedy nevertheless relies on a certain unexpectedness, if not necessarily spontaneity; the most basic comedic formula in the world is to take a basic premise and flip it in such a way that the audience wouldn’t expect, hopefully in a clever or outrageous enough way that they react. And given that these Apatovian comedies tend to rely on a certain level of endearing outrageousness—see the frank discussion of all things sex—starting to see how the punchlines are developing tends to take away some of their oomph.

 

That’s most apparent in the first parts of I Love You, Man, before the sloppy charm of Rudd and Segel can work its magic. Opening with Peter proposing to his short-term girlfriend, Zooey (The Office’s  Rashida Jones), it pretty quickly gets to some ribald chatter, in the form of Zooey’s friends praising Peter’s willingness to go down on her. We soon find out that though Zooey has a gaggle of potential bridesmaid’s, Peter’s never been much of a “friend guy,” and he embarks on a quest to find the perfect guy. Things pick up considerably by the “man date” montage: until this series comes along to liven things up, particularly a hilarious poker night sequence with Jon Favreau, I Love You, Man seems in serious danger of lolling off into a crude-comic wasteland, trotting out two bush jokes and some gay humour without much life.

 

But then Segel shows up with a monologue about a potential farter, and things are right where they should be, in comfortable buddy-comedy territory. There isn’t really a whole lot in the way of engaging story here—a bit of tension emerges between Sydney and Zooey, but it’s never terribly serious—but Segel and Rudd have a pretty natural chemistry, Segel as effervescent slacker and Rudd as a man so criminally uptight he can’t even give Sydney a proper nickname (or, in one of the film’s better running gags, do an impression that doesn’t sound like a leprechaun). They’re helped by a pretty solid supporting cast, too: there’s a litany of comedic talent here—a lot of it pulled from UCB and SNL alum—especially Sarah Burns as Zooey’s desperate single friend Hailey and JK Simmons as Peter’s dad.