With Friends Like These...

An entertaining, clever look at the backstabbing actors do in search of recognition and fame.

The perennially insecure world of two-bit character actors is humorously and knowingly explored in With Friends Like These.

Originally released seven years ago on home video, is only now surfacing as a theatrical release. Although it's no classic, it's a cut or two smarter than the average Hollywood comedy. At its best, it plays like a less acerbic, less Jewish triple episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." (review of re-release)

Only sporadically amusing. (review of re-release)

Not even amusing cameos from Bill Murray as a freeloading producer and Michael McKean as a proctologist can keep With Friends Like These... from being as minor as the film careers of its two-bit protagonists.

Gives off an air of clammy desperation that feels all too authentic without being especially funny and bogs down early in repetitive shtick. (review of re-release)

Messina's characters gripe at being typecast as goombah hit men, yet the director seems blissfully unaware that he dooms them to the very fate they protest by painting them with such prosaic, uninspired strokes. (review of re-release)