I never played drinking games in my collegiate youth -- I was never in a fraternity, did not study engineering and grew up in Canada, so the general idea was to just drink. Beerfest, the new comedy from the five-comedian collective known as Broken Lizard, begins as two American brothers, Jan (Paul Soter) and Todd (Erik Stolhanske) Wolfhouse take their dear departed father's ashes from Colorado to Munich, Germany to fulfill his last wishes. Along the way, they stumble into a secret international competition of drinking games called "Beerfest" -- an alternative to commercialized drink-fests, for as one member of the Australian team notes profanely, "Oktoberfest is for tossers and sheep-shaggers!" While disastrously failing to enact their dad's final wishes, the brothers have their family honor and national pride desperately bruised by the VonWolfhausen clan -- the German branch of the family, who perennially win Beerfest. Shamed but not broken, the Wolfhouse brothers set out to make a rag-tag team of drinking game, uh, athletes (and with ESPN2 carrying hot dog-devouring coverage between spelling bees and spear fishing, that's not such a crazy phrase) to win next year's Beerfest.

Beerfest is dumb as a box of rocks. It's a brawny, badly-shot mess that goes on a little too long. It has, as its stars, a group of five men who are far from conventionally handsome, and not conventionally funny. It doesn't hate women, but it doesn't have a lot for them to do aside from bare their breasts and provide exposition. And I loved it -- or, rather, I laughed during it and was consistently amused by audacity and stupidity going hand in hand. It's a dumb movie made by smart people, who took a pitch of 'Fight Club with beer' and managed to wrest a sports-movie parody out of it through sheer force of will while still mocking bad '80s action cinema, world cultural relations, and our relationship with, as noted sage Homer J. Simpson put it, "... Alcohol: The cause of -- and solution to -- all of life's problems." Beerfest is the best smart-yet-dumb American comedy since Dodgeball.

If there is one underrated character actor in the world it is Richard E. Grant. Since his breakthrough role in Withnail and I, the actor has appeared in over 50 films and therefore has one of those faces that has audiences asking, "Where have I seen him before?" With a rubbery face and a remarkable skill with dialects, he seems comfortable with broad and dry comedy, serious drama and crazed villainy, all of which he's exhibited in films ranging from Spice World to The Age of Innocence. He has played the lead in quite a few movies, and carried them very well -- I especially like him in the little-seen A Merry War -- but he is most easily recognizable for supporting parts in which he tends to stand out. He was the one enjoyable part of Hudson Hawk (not that it was hard) and was a piece of the brilliant ensemble in Gosford Park.

After watching his directorial debut, Wah-Wah, I'd like Grant to stay in front of the camera. The film, which he also wrote, is not a wasted effort, but there is nothing about it that is evidence he should be making movies rather than stealing scenes in them. The only significance it holds is that it is based somewhat on his own coming of age in the South African country of Swaziland during its transition to independence from Great Britain. But that is only of significance to Grant, and not to viewers, who, if they are anything like me, could do just fine, thank you, without another cinematic memoir of alcoholic fathers and distant mothers and incoherent scenes that add up to a whole without a center.