Introducing Mark Cappuccio, a good friend of our chief critic Mike Edwards and the latest London based reviewer to join our staff. Please don’t confuse Mark with our other reviewer Mark Clark! We will have to come up with some kind of idea to distinguish between the two!

Here it is another in the recent line of ‘him flicks’ as I call them following on from last years excellent Pineapple Express and The Boat That Rocked which means ostensibly romantic comedies for guys!

This time we follow Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) as a successful real estate agent and all round good boyfriend and bloke. He has the girl of his dreams Zooey (Rashida Jones) and asks her to marry him and she agrees but he is crestfallen to find that he has no actual close male friends to call on to be his best man. He even thinks he can use his gay younger brother Robbie but he says he is their dad’s best friend and cant do it but he will help him find a new best friend and tells him to go on man dates with various guys from his gym and one he runs into at a work open house called Sydney (an excellent Jason Segel) with hilarious consequences all round.

Peter bonds with Sydney massively and spends more and more time with him calling into question though his relationship with Zooey and their impending marriage. So who will he chose between and what will happen?

It seems now that women are not having all the chick flicks to themselves anymore as Hollywood has wised up that men like laughing too along with drinking, playing in garage bands, looking at hot girls and in a new age way talking about their feelings for each other as proved in the final 10 minutes of Pineapple Express last year. This film from director John Hamburg who brought us Along Came Polly is new in that the focus is on the guys and not the girl leading up to the wedding and through a witty and laugh out loud funny script from Hamburg and co-writer Larry Levin manages to put the spotlight on modern male friendships and what makes them tick and asks some interesting questions about what it means to be a man today and what is expected of him.

There are many many stand out scenes from a brilliant running Lou (Hulk) Ferrigno gag to the two guys playing instruments together in a fab Rush tribute and even getting to see them in concert geekily singing along to all the words while Zooey looks grumpy behind them. This is a fab celebration of male friendship but not in a crude and rude way but something that will appeal to those of us that are over 25 and beginning to dare I say it ‘grow up’. It’s well acted all round from two great central performances from Rudd and Segel to what seems to be loads of the cast from Swingers, Knocked Up and the Broken Lizard guys along with the always excellent J.K. Simmons as Peter’s dad. Yes you could say it’s a comedy version of Fight Club and that is no bad thing, so get the night from your girlfriend and take your mates along to this ace rom-com for guys!