Wanderlust

WANDERLUST has all the hallmarks of a brilliant Judd Apatow movie: raunchy humor, absurdist set-ups, and a heaping serving of the awesome Paul Rudd. With a recipe like that, how can it go wrong? And it doesn't, really; it piles up the hilarity one ridiculous situation after another until you succumb. A scene in which Rudd stares at a mirror and talks dirty to himself will leave audiences heaving in laughter.

Still, Wanderlust doesn't quite strike comedy gold. Though it's laced with seriously funny moments, it often goes for cheaper laughs. (Ha ha, naked people with real-life bodies subject to the vagaries of gravity while running! Ha ha, vegans!) When a sight gag involves a woman delivering her own baby on a front porch and later displaying the placenta (complete with the requisite eating-the-placenta joke), it's all over. Wanderlust begins with a question for our time: Is this breakneck speed, this pursuit of life, liberty, and real estate equity worth it? It answers that question, of course, and in the way we'd expect it to. But how truly brilliant would it have been if the process of coming up with the answer, as well as the answer itself (in other words, the movie) had taken a more unexpected road?