Date Night

Nice thing, because without them, "Date Night" would be an unqualified disaster. Even with them it is an uneven proposition, veering wildly from genuinely funny scenes directly in to ridiculousness and back again. But every time Shawn Levy's movie makes that journey, it is harder to get back on solid footing.

Steve Carell and Tina Fey are funny people, as someone who is ever watched NBC on Thursday nights can attest.

They do manage a every week date night, and after learning that their friends (Mark Ruffalo and Kristen Wiig, funny in small over cameos) are splitting up because their marriage has gotten stale and predictable, Phil and Claire select to spice things up. They venture from their home in New Jersey to a pretentious seafood place in New York (Claw, where they answer the phone by saying, "Claw, you are more than welcome."). Adrift without reservations, they steal those of a no-show couple.

Carell and Fey, so funny as the stars of "The Office" and "30 Rock," respectively, play Phil and Claire Foster, a stereotypical busy married couple. He is a tax consultant, she is a real-estate agent, and they typically work themselves to exhaustion every day before feeding their kids, collapsing in to bed and beginning the whole system again the next morning. (Very realistic, by the way.)

Thus begins a chase that takes the Fosters through Manhattan, which includes a stop at the apartment of a buff former client of Claire's, played with winning bemusement by Mark Wahlberg, who never manages to put a shirt on. Better still is a stop by the apartment of the real couple who had the Claw reservation, Taste and Whippet, four stoners hilariously played by James Franco and Mila Kunis, who act out a low-rent version of the frustrations and stagnation that is been nagging at the Fosters' marriage. It is the best scene in the movie.

Giant mistake. Aside from being branded socially unacceptable (a jogging joke), they are set on by a couple of thugs (Common and Jimmi Simpson) who, thinking Phil and Claire are the people who are supposed to be at the table, require the immediate return of a flash drive that belongs to a mob boss (Ray Liotta).

Unfortunately, it leads directly in to the stupidest automobile chase in memory. But not, as it happens, the stupidest scene in the movie. That comes soon after, when Phil and Claire must perform a pole dance for a crooked district attorney (William Fichtner, nicely sleazy). Perhaps it sounded lovely in the script, but it is flat and ridiculous onscreen, not funny at all.