WMS

The 40 Year Old Virgin

2005 · Directed by Judd Apatow

🧘4

Woke Score

73

Critic

🍿73

Audience

Ultra Based

Critics rated this 69 points above its woke score. Among Ultra Based films, this critic score ranks #531 of 1469.

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Synopsis

Andy Stitzer has a pleasant life with a nice apartment and a job stamping invoices at an electronics store. But at age 40, there's one thing Andy hasn't done, and it's really bothering his sex-obsessed male co-workers: Andy is still a virgin. Determined to help Andy get laid, the guys make it their mission to de-virginize him. But it all seems hopeless until Andy meets small business owner Trish, a single mom.

Consciousness Assessment

The 40 Year Old Virgin is a male-centered comedy that treats women as romantic objects and narrative devices rather than fully realized characters. Catherine Keener's Trish exists primarily as the prize at the end of Andy's sexual journey, while Elizabeth Banks and Leslie Mann populate the margins as decorative figures in scenes of male bonding and crude humor. The film's entire comedic apparatus rests on the premise that masculinity is defined by sexual conquest and that male friendship involves relentless mockery of anyone deviating from heterosexual norms. The inclusion of Romany Malco as one of the coworkers provides minimal racial representation without any meaningful engagement with racial themes or consciousness. Apatow's directorial debut is content to traffic in the conventional gender dynamics and sexual anxiety that defined mainstream comedy in 2005, offering no interrogation of these dynamics and certainly no progressive reconsideration of masculine behavior. The film is competently crafted entertainment that reinforces rather than challenges the social assumptions of its moment.

Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm

Critic Reviews

73%from 35 reviews
Entertainment Weekly91

Buoyantly clever and amusing.

Owen GleibermanRead Full Review →
Dallas Observer90

Virgin is astoundingly astute but also wondrously clever, written with more care and joy than any hundred comedies to come out of Hollywood in years.

Robert WilonskyRead Full Review →
L.A. Weekly90

It's an unconscionably funny sex farce that, by its end, turns into a tender and honest romance, an acute portrait of loneliness and, believe it or not, a musical. This is a movie Blake Edwards might have made.

Scott FoundasRead Full Review →
Seattle Post-Intelligencer42

Judd Apatow brings no cleverness or wit to his one-joke situation, and he can't give it the kernel of credibility that even a low comedy needs to sustain itself for a feature length.

William ArnoldRead Full Review →