The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) may be the worst movie ever made.  I know, I know, I am falling for the sort of superlatives usually reserved for those attempting clickbait.  In my defense, I do hope to get lots of people reading The Legionnaire.  I am not above trying to sound dramatic in order to get noticed, to a certain degree.  The one thing you do not want is to sound desperate.  Also, the danger of using such intense descriptors is in doing it too often.  There are a few films that I have reviewed about which I have said the same thing.  With frequent strident declarations, they lose their impact.  People do not want to constantly hear that the sky is falling, although I do not think this could be posited enough about American culture and the direction it is taking.  What you should do is read things carefully.  Hopefully you noticed that I tempered my first sentence with the word “may.”  I stand by my original statement until the end.  Please continue to find out why.

Andy Stitzer (Steve Carell) is The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and yes, I stole that phrase from another plot synopsis.  It just works, you know?  Anyway, Andy is as unassuming a person as you could want, riding a bike to his job at a fictional big box electronics store.  Because he is quiet and keeps to himself, his immediate co-worker in the stock room, Cal (Seth Rogen), assumes he is a serial killer.  If there is anything habitual about Andy, it is his love for collectible toys, his small apartment full of shelves lined with rare items.  This is all set up to visually explain why somebody of his age has not had sex.  Later, we see that a series of awkward moments with a couple women led to him giving up.  Thus, his celibacy was not for a lack of trying.  At any rate, it is one of the salesmen, David (Paul Rudd), that invites Andy back to the store later that night to be play poker.  Between Andy, Cal, David, and another salesman, Jay (Romany Malco), their cards conversation turns to the kind of raunchy, frat boy sex talk you would expect for a stereotypical evening with the guys.  The strangeness of Andy’s tales, and the nervousness with which he conveys them, leads him to reluctantly confessing that he is still a virgin.  From here, the others each make it their mission, collectively and individually, to see that they help Andy correct this so-called mistake.  There is little need of detailing everything they do to him.  It is all ridiculous and full of the worst advice one can imagine regarding how to approach and/or treat women.  Luckily, and to Andy’s, um, relief(?), none of it results in coitus.  In the midst of all this nonsense, however, he meets Trish Piedmont (Catherine Keener).  She comes into the store one day, and because she is not young and hot, all the other guys pass on helping her.  For whatever reason, she and Andy get along well, and before she leaves, she gives him her phone number.  Instead of following his heart, Andy inexplicably decides to listen to his friends.  Their main piece of advice is that he needs to get laid before he can consider having a relationship with another person, let alone someone to which he is genuinely attracted.  This leads to another series of nearly unbearable misadventures, which only makes Andy waffle on whether he should call Trish.  She works in a store directly across the street from his place of employment, and it takes his co-workers questioning his resolve for him to finally pluck up the courage to go speak to her.  This becomes their first date, which brings them back to her place.  While she is in the bathroom, he cannot seem to get prophylactics right.  Sigh.  At any rate, before it can go any further, Trish’s teenaged daughter Marla Piedmont (Kat Dennings) bursts into the room and witnesses the compromising position.  She is mad because she thinks it is unfair that her mom can have sex and she is not allowed, even though her appearance unwittingly prevented coitus.  Despite this chaotic event, Andy and Trish agree to go out with another.  He is about to tell her on their next time out that he is still a virgin, but she interrupts with her own admissions.  She has three children of her own, and one old enough to have a child, making her a grandmother.  While Andy is fine with all this, they decide to put off intercourse.  Trish does not expect him to be able to make it, but he says he can go twenty dates without the need for that kind of intimacy.  There proceeds a montage of their interactions, all the while inching closer to the agreed upon number.  When it finally comes, she is ready to pounce on him, but he is still not ready.  Feeling pressured, he accuses her of trying to change him and storms out of the house.  Believing things are over and that his friends are right about the pointlessness of serious relationships, he goes to a party being thrown by Jay where he meets Beth (Elizabeth Banks).  She is somebody Cal had previously tried to set him up with, but had never gone through with it.  Being with her, though, he realizes that he is still not ready for sex, and he leaves when his friends arrive and convince him that Trish is the one for him.  There is one last hiccup here when Andy gets home to find Trish in his apartment.  She is furious because she finds a box of pornography given to him by David.  He goes after her on his bike and almost dies in an accident.  Anyway, she forgives him and they get married.

Remember what I said about how terrible is The 40-Year-Old Virgin?  I think, if you read my synopsis, you can understand why a practicing Catholic would say such a thing about the film.  Yet, I left off the very end of it.  It is not until after they are married that they finally have sex.  Hooray!  Pre-marital sex is something against which I have often railed.  Once more, I ask, did anything good come of the base sensual pursuits of all the characters?  I shall detail it for you.  Andy’s experiences can be ignored because they are played for comedic effect.  Still, they taught him that sex is something to be feared.  That is not what the Church teaches, at all.  What should be focused on is the bliss we see between Andy and Trish after their ceremony.  Can this also be felt outside of confines of marriage?  Sure, but there are always consequences.  Cal is a deeply lonely person, David cannot get over his ex-girlfriend (Mindy Kaling) with whom he had sex, and Jay’s sneaking around behind his own girlfriend should have resulted in him having to deal with heartache.  With this last bit, though, the film surprises with a pro-life message when Jay finds out that his girlfriend is pregnant.  They decide to get back together and have the baby, once more showing the power that life has and why it should be respected.  One can only pray that he will be faithful moving forward.

To repeat, none of what in The 40-Year-Old Virgin is worth your time until Andy and Trish get married.  There is a stereotype that Catholic couples who wait until marriage are somehow prudes.  While the film makes no attempt at suggesting that Andy and Trish are Catholic, I would hold them up as an example of how this is not the case.  Sex is not about having a wild time.  There is a purpose to it that is painfully missing from this film.  The film is also, I might add, extremely homophobic.  Do not see it.