I'm getting a bit too old to find arrested development charming. There comes a moment when you really want that "loser friend" of yours who has always amused you with his knowledge of video games and refusal to get a real job to just grow up, dammit. Alby Cutrera (Matt McGrath), the loser on display in Full Grown Men, is an unemployed cartoonist who at age 35 has a pissed-off wife (Katie Kreisler) and a young son. Far more interested in his collection of action figures than in the mundane realities of everyday life, such as work, he is arrested development incarnate.

Finally tossed out of his Florida home, he heads home to his mentally ill mother and decides, in Chevy Chase style, to journey to a theme park, Diggityland, and with any luck make some money along the way by selling off his toys. Reluctantly joining him on the trip is a childhood buddy named Elias (Judah Friedlander), who seems just about as clueless but has tried to make a go of it as a special ed teacher.

Given that this is a road trip flick that cuts its way across a particularly bleak and bleached-out swath of Florida, you can expect some weirdness to come Alby's way. Sure enough, the first hitchhiker the two men pick up is a former Diggityland employee (Alan Cumming) who tells a long story about urinating inside his theme park animal costume and basically gives off a vibe of someone who'd like to blow up Cinderella's castle with a fertilizer bomb.

Later Alby runs into clown-in-training Amy Sedaris in a bar, but she ends up sending a team of midgets (little people?) to give him a beat down when he can't pay his bill. Finally, Deborah Harry shows up as a former theme park mermaid performer who now lives in a trailer.

This is all strangeness for its own sake, as if John Waters were serving as assistant casting director on the picture. A road movie is supposed to take its characters on both an actual and a spiritual journey, but Alby doesn't really get anywhere other than to a deeper understanding of what a schlub he is and how his life-long irresponsibility has hurt other people, especially Elias.

Full Grown Men might work better if the audience was given a reason to feel even a small sliver of sympathy for Alby, but as things stand, it's really hard to care if he'll ever make it to Diggityland or get back together with his justifiably exasperated wife.



What, no pepper?