"The 40-Year-Old Virgin": Into the Wood

Just when it seemed like "Wedding Crashers" was bound to be the funniest and most politically incorrect movie of the year, along comes this unbelievably foul-mouthed, ferociously irreverent and nonstop, gaspingly hilarious picture to wipe out that possibility beyond all quibbling. "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" immediately establishes faux-mild-mannered Steve Carell, of "The Daily Show" and "The Office," as a major big-screen comic star, and does something similar for several other members of the cast, too.

Carell, who co-wrote the movie with first-time director Judd Apatow, plays Andy Stitzer, a likable feeb who's settling into middle age without ever having had sex with anyone. (It for some reason never happened, he says, and "I just kinda stopped trying.") Andy works in a big electronics store in the San Fernando Valley, and while his fellow employees David (Paul Rudd), Jay (Romany Malco), and Cal (Seth Rogen) spend their spare time swapping wincingly detailed sex stories — "I don't even know if she can walk," Jay says of a recent bed bunny — Andy is reduced to admitting he spent the weekend making a really good egg salad. Finally realizing that their odd but likable colleague is a virgin, the boys determine to change that as quickly as possible.

First they take him to a hot club, where Jay instructs Andy to seek out a girl who's drunk — "I mean vomit in the hair ... a broken heel is good." He succeeds in doing this, but the woozy babe he scores winds up puking in his face on the way to her house. (Inhaling through the goo, he asks her, "Did you have a daiquiri tonight?") He eventually connects with another girl who's completely sober, but she turns out to be such a freak ("Let's shave each other!") that he flees in horror. His pals try to console him after such flame-outs by emphasizing how difficult relations with women can be even after you get the sex thing out of the way. Jay, for instance, says he just had a fight with his live-in girlfriend simply because "I came home a little tipsy and I still had my condom on." Andy starts to despair.

After a long series of other stupendously funny incidents (the chest-waxing scene is kinda unique), Andy finally gets together with Trish (Catherine Keener), a woman who's been around and is now ready to meet a just-plain-nice guy. Unfortunately, she wants to come to his house, which is a dorkosaurus lair crammed with toy soldiers, vintage action figures in their original boxes (Aquaman!) and lame-rock-band memorabilia. ("You really had an Asia poster framed?" Cal asks, in wonder.) This place has to be cleared of all the geekware, his buddies insist, "so it doesn't look like Neverland Ranch."

I gotta stop. Just about all of the many, many other great lines in the picture are totally unquotable in this forum. Almost all of them are whole-heartedly filthy, but not in a mega-stupid "Deuce Bigelow" way; they're smart and tangy, and you wish they'd never end. Fortunately, you can always see this movie again, and possibly again. Probably right away.

"Red Eye": Unfriendly Skies

Rachel McAdams (of "Wedding Crashers" and "Mean Girls") plays Lisa Reisert, a troubleshooting hotel executive who specializes in smoothing the feathers of difficult guests. Lisa has been in Dallas for the funeral of her grandmother, and as the movie opens, she's headed to the airport to catch a red-eye back to Miami, where she works at a high-end resort. On the way, she deals with minor hotel crises via cell phone and also squeezes in a call to her father (Brian Cox, of "The Bourne Supremacy"), who tells her, among other things, that his wallet has been stolen.

The scene that greets Lisa when she arrives at the airport is possibly the scariest part of the movie, highlighting, as it does, just about every hellacious aspect of the contemporary air-travel experience: the long lines, the delays and cancellations, the rows of weary, irritated people jammed into hard plastic seats as they wait and wait and wait for flights that never seem to leave the tarmac. Waiting in line herself, Lisa gets chatted up by a stubbly, good-looking young guy named Jackson (Cillian Murphy, the psycho shrink in "Batman Begins"). He's sort of charming, so she agrees to have a drink with him before boarding. Then, when she gets on the plane, she discovers that they're seated together. Fine. They chat some more. When the plane leaves the ground, though, Jackson's charming mask suddenly comes off.

It turns out he's a professional assassin, employed at the moment in a plot to kill a top politician, Jack Keefe (Jack Scalia), the Deputy Director of Homeland Security. Keefe and his wife and kids, accompanied by a retinue of Secret Service bodyguards, are at that very moment on the way to check into their customary vacation suite in Lisa's hotel. Jackson tells Lisa she must call the hotel on the plane's on-board air phone and make sure the Keefe party gets re-assigned to another suite; he gives her the room number. If she doesn't do this, he says, her father will be killed by a murderous colleague Jackson has posted outside Dad's house. To prove he's serious, Jackson pulls something out of his jacket — the old man's wallet.

The movie is constructed largely of close-up two-shots of Lisa and Jackson, and McAdams and Murphy are smoothly effective in these tight quarters. She's convincing as a strong woman who's not accustomed to being bullied, but finally sees no choice between facilitating the murder of her father or the wipeout of the Keefe family. Murphy, for his part, is deeply creepy — possibly beyond the call of plot or picture. After a series of desperate delaying tactics, Lisa finally makes the call to reroute the Keefes to the other suite that Jackson has indicated. Then Jackson makes a call, and the hit — which involves a group of co-conspirators with a rocket launcher in a fishing boat offshore — is set in motion.

When the plane arrives in Miami, Lisa lashes out violently, and momentarily escapes Jackson's clutches. She flees the aircraft without letting the crew in on her plight, then evades police inside the airport. Making off with a car she finds idling in the drop-off area outside, she calls the hotel on her cell phone and desperately tries to get the Keefes evacuated. Her cell runs out of juice while she's trying to call her father, though, so she heads for his house. Jackson, now very much the worse for wear, nevertheless manages to follow her.

Okay. First of all, if a bunch of guys in a fishing boat can fire a rocket into the hotel suite Jackson has chosen, why couldn't they just fire it into the suite the Keefes were originally booked into? (It presumably had an ocean view, too — the guy's a bigwig.) And why doesn't Lisa let the crew in on what's happening as she flees the plane, or at least run to the cops for help when she gets inside the terminal? And why does Jackson — who by this time is gushing blood and must realize the murder plot has been blown — decide to pursue her? Only the writers, Carl Ellsworth and Dan Foos, know, and they're not telling.

There are two other problems with the picture, one rather minor, if you're in a forgiving mood, one rather not. The special effects are remarkably tacky. The occasional exterior shots of the airplane cruising high above the clouds suggest a shiny toy model suspended above an unusually fluffy white quilt. And the fiery explosion when the rocket hits the outside of the hotel would be an embarrassment to a teenage Photoshopper.

A more central concern, I think, is Cillian Murphy, the skilled young Irish actor who's been steadily heading toward stardom in movies like "28 Days Later" and "Girl with a Pearl Earring." Here, with his wild blue eyes and threatening intimacy, he is so strange — so humidly insinuating — that he calls to mind, most unwantedly, the image of master creep Eric Roberts. This is off-putting in a fundamental way that works against the picture; it's distracting.

It is also ... ironic, I guess is the word, that Lisa, who demonstrates throughout a powerful talent for butt-kicking self defense, must in the end be saved by a man with a blaster. This wraps up the story with a familiar thud of convenience. "Red Eye" is a movie that flies for a while, but is finally grounded by its heavy cargo of unbelievability.

—Kurt Loder

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