'Brothers Solomon' proves wise by borrowing from funny films

OK, let's see if we've got the movie comedy timeline straight: Not quite a decade ago, the Farrelly brothers really break out. Over the last couple of years, audiences finally find a new anything-goes brand in Judd Apatow, director of "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Knocked Up." (Heck, even the Farrellys had grown restless with the same old, same old, and moved on to "Fever Pitch.") So now the next logical development is to knock off Apatow . . . pod-shuffling his humor with the Farrellys' ?

Riding the recent wave in somewhat unlikely style, sketch comedian/director Bob Odenkirk ("Mr. Show," "Let's Go to Prison") and writer Will Forte ("Saturday Night Live") essentially imagine it's the "Dumb and Dumber" guys having the sex and baby issues. Will Arnett ("Arrested Development") and Forte are John and Dean Solomon, siblings and urban roomies whose home-schooled upbringing in the Arctic wastes somehow failed to educate them in the ways of women ("puppet-based sex education" lessons notwithstanding). The boys were raised to have an indefatigable can-do attitude, so they mostly just shrug off their forced celibacy with "we'll get 'em next time" optimism. They're Steve Carell minus the inhibitions and after-hours melancholy. But when they learn that dad Lee Majors is comatose and close to death, they promptly fixate on having a baby as the one bit of miracle news that might keep the old man hanging on.

The movie gets some good moments out of the various false starts that eventually lead the two to Janine (Kristen Wiig), a levelheaded but desperately broke woman kinda-sorta willing to rent them a womb, despite the comically foul-mouthed protests of her estranged boyfriend (Chi McBride). And the brothers, of course, are just as blithely clueless about babies as they are about relationships, setting up a few new variations on those requisite junior high health class exercises in caring for a doll without mangling it. There's one joke in particular about putting a positive spin on scary-dirty diapers that gets stretched like an undersize onesie - yet Arnett and Forte get away with it, hilariously.

"Brothers Solomon" easily tops what Odenkirk, Arnett, and McBride delivered with the stale "Prison," but this new goof might have been funnier still if the premise weren't so derivative, so just been there, done that. It's also odd, if fitting, that a story all about ineptitude with girls actually handles them pretty tentatively itself. From the straightforward material Wiig's given here, you'd hardly know she was an "SNL" castmate of Forte's. And Malin Akerman ("The Comeback") plays it mostly cool but then inexplicably warmer at points as the smokin' chick next door who wants none of John. Ah, women - can't get with 'em, can't make a movie on the subject without 'em.