‘This is 40’ is a thinly entertaining look turning the big 4-0

Published: December 21, 2012 

Film Review This Is 40

Maude Apatow, Iris Apatow, Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann play a family grappling with issues of aging.

Suzanne Hanover — Associated Press

Stupid freaking Judd Apatow, with his stupid freaking foul-mouthed and sentimental “Hobbit”-length comedies, his stupid freaking insistence on not only peopling them with his old comic cronies, but his wife and cursing kids.

Happy freaking R-rated holidays, America. Here’s your “Meet the Parents” this year: longer and less funny.

“This Is 40” — the very premise is flawed, since everybody knows “50 is the new 40” — is a sort of sequel to “Knocked Up” that catches up with the struggling, funny and quite real sidekick couple of that film, Debbie and Pete, played by Leslie Mann (Mrs. Apatow) and Paul Rudd.

It’s an intermittently amusing dance through generations of bad parenting come home to roost, poor family planning and worse economic planning, when they both hit that milestone birthday, which tells Debbie they’re getting old.

He takes Viagra. She lies about her birthday and insists she’s 38. He breaks wind in bed to remind you that Apatow was once Adam Sandler’s roommate.

They’re impulsive, unfiltered folks who can’t understand how their daughters (Apatow and Mann’s real-life kids) have the same potty-mouths they do, who bought too much house, too many cars, spent too much keeping his boutique record label afloat and her clothing boutique running.

And now, at 40, the chickens are coming home to roost.

“This Is 40” is more like Apatow’s excruciating “Funny People” than “Knocked Up.”

Apatow has turned more Cameron Crowe (“Elizabethtown”) since jumping the shark — more interested in trying to grapple with big life moments, unable to edit his indulgent movies into anything tighter and funnier.

If “This Is 40,” one shudders to think what he’ll serve up when that AARP card arrives in the mail and he — and Mann — are faced with “This Is 50.”

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