La réalisation de Jay Roach s'avère fruste et le niveau de jeu des deux vedettes, mal assorti, avec, d'un côté, un Paul Rudd trop effacé, et, de l'autre, un Steve Carell déguisé et grimaçant.

Steve Carell is not Jim Carrey and his great strength as an actor is in the way he convincingly plays the sympathetic everyman. Carell's too talented to blow it even when he's miscast, but he ends up bringing a lot of that everyman sympathy to a character who is absolutely not an everyman and would probably be funnier if he didn't have our sympathy.

It treads a careful boundary between nasty and sweet, balancing the rude humor of humiliation with an affirming, tolerant, almost scolding final message: Be nice! It dabbles in sexual naughtiness without dreaming of going too far into complicated zones of lust and betrayal. (The French version, as you might expect, goes much further.)