Paul Rudd has played his fair share of clueless knuckleheads, but never one as sitcom-innocuous as the title character in Our Idiot Brother. His beaming baby face obscured by a bushy Jerry Garcia beard, the actor stars as Ned, a backwoods doofus so deprived of common sense he gets tricked into selling things he shouldn’t to a police officer. Rudd, as dopey-sweet as ever, remains impossible to dislike. There’s just nothing especially funny about this character, whose range of emotions is about as narrow as that of his beloved pet pooch.

The movie surrounding him isn’t so hot, either. It suggests a one-joke Jack Black vehicle directed by Nicole Holofcener. After cheerfully doing time for his misdemeanour, Ned packs his bags and heads to New York City, where he becomes the shared burden of his three neurotic sisters. Predictably, Ned’s brand of diarrhoea-mouth honesty wreaks havoc on all of their lives – that is, until each sister learns to see his hippy-dippy world view as a guide to better living. While it’s great to see Rudd headlining his own comedies, he deserves better than playing the human equivalent of Beethoven the dog.