Forgetting Sarah Marshall (15)

The latest effort from Hollywood’s current reigning clowns starts, quite graphically, with a naked man's heart breaking in a kitchen and ends with a musical puppet version of Dracula.

However, this is perhaps to suggest that Forgetting Sarah Marshall (15) is rather more off-the-wall and outrageous than it really is.

In reality, it’s an occasionally sweet-natured and amusing rom-com drawn from the pool of talent built around The 40 Year Old Virgin/Knocked Up writer-director Judd Apatow.

Apatow here takes another producer credit, a nascent sign that, although audiences can expect a rom-com thankfully several notches above Matthew McConaughey-level dreck, it’s still not in the league of his own material.

This time round we have the promising Jason Segel, who played the slightly creepy goateed friend in Knocked Up, as loser-in-love Peter.

The soundtrack composer gets the old heave-ho from long-term girlfriend Sarah (Kristen Bell), star of the cop show he works for. She dumps him while he’s naked and leaves him to sob uncontrollably about stuff like cereal to stepbrother Brian.

The film doesn’t shy away from the snotty, undignified mess of breaking up, or even the anger – one surprisingly shocking scene sees the grief-stricken Peter disfigure a cinema screensized image of Sarah with a chair as he vents his frustration at work.

What makes all this that bit more disturbing is it’s played for laughs. However, the main set-up comes when the lanky, slobbish lonely heart clears off to Hawaii to escape his pain – only to discover Sarah already there with new boyfriend Aldous Snow (a surprise appearance by our own Russell Brand).

It’s an admittedly contrived scenario, one explained away by the fact Peter deliberately goes there in the knowledge it’s his ex’s favourite holiday spot, but is then shocked to cross paths.

While much of the humour is milked from this awkward situation, Segel (who also wrote the script) and director Nicholas Stoller realise it’s not enough in itself and branch out into other story strands, including a will-they-won’t-they romance between Peter and hotel receptionist Rachel (a likeable turn by Mila Kunis).

There’s the usual roll-call of embarrassments: the drunken pratfalls, misunderstandings and flustered explanations. Another feature of the Apatow crowd is the use of ensemble casts, with a variety of minor characters all getting the opportunity to come centre stage.

This time there’s Superbad’s Jonah Hill as a slack waiter, a barely recognisable Paul Rudd as a beach bum surf instructor and Bill Hader as smart-mouthed Brian dispensing advice via laptop and phone.

It will come as something of a blow to Russell Brand’s many detractors (of whom there must be at least as many as fans) that he is actually rather good as the oversexed parody rock star Snow.

Admittedly he doesn’t exactly stretch to acting, but his all-conquering scrofulous charm fits the bill, while his irritating maniacal tendencies are toned down sufficiently to ensure he amuses, if not dazzles, audiences with his comic turn.

Kirsten Bell thankfully gets a more rounded character than most rom-com actresses, even if the boys are given most of the laughs. But it’s Segel’s baleful, over-sized geek Peter who carries the film to its inevitable, if unusually placed end.

These new young Turks are the best thing to happen to American comedy since the early-Eighties’ heyday of Saturday Night Live, and it’s good they’re getting to inject some much-needed smart, modern humour into Hollywood.

But they could do with reining in the number of projects on the go and focusing on a better hit rate.