THE PROTAGONISTS of Role Modelsare a couple of opportunistic under-achievers going through the motions of promoting a ghastly energy drink called Minotaur. Conning gullible teachers, they wangle their way into Los Angeles high schools under the pretext of an anti-drugs campaign that recommends Minotaur as a healthy alternative.
Wheeler, the younger of the two salesmen, is gregarious, feckless and - not unusually for a character played by Seann William Scott - obsessed with sex. Paul Rudd is admirably deadpan as his colleague Danny, who is uptight and professionally frustrated after 10 years in the job, and almost as pedantic as Peter O'Toole's character in the recent Dean Spanley. Danny loudly objects to people employing terms such as "asap" and "24/7" in conversation, or using their fingers to indicate quotation marks.
Danny gets much more to bother him after his lawyer lover (Elizabeth Banks) leaves him, and when he and Wheeler are sentenced to 150 hours of community service following a road rage incident. They are assigned to work as "bigs", mentors to "littles", troubled children at Sturdy Wings, an organisation run by a steely reformed cocaine addict (scene-stealing Jane Lynch).
Wheeler is paired with a precocious, foul-mouthed 10-year- old boy (Bobb'e J Thompson), while Danny is landed with Augie (Superbad's Christopher Mintz- Plasse), a shy geek living in a fantasy world of medieval games reenactments.
The supposedly grown-up role models eventually bond with their young charges, but predictable as that feel-good outcome is, director David Wain succeeds in keeping phoney sentiment at bay by sustaining the movie's irreverent tone.
As is de rigueur for the genre, pop culture references abound in a movie preoccupied with the phallic symbolism of lyrics in Kiss songs and with what Wings did and did not record. When Danny draws on familiar movie dialogue in his tactless proposal of marriage, some lines ("You complete me", "You had me at hello") are more obvious than others ("Who you gonna call?").
***
Directed by David Wain. Starring Seann William Scott, Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Bobb'e J Thompson, Jane Lynch 16 cert, gen release, 98 min
