If you sit through this half-baked, by-the-numbers, preachy comedy, you can't miss the gamespotting. Early in the movie, Vince Vaughn's character is identified as being very busy "finishing his game", Guitar Hero. A specific Guitar Hero isn't specified and this certainly isn't a period piece, so you can bet you've just heard an instance of product placement. Let's do the math. This is a Universal movie, and Universal's parent company is Vivendi. Guitar Hero is an Activision property, and Activision's parent company is Vivendi. Yep, it adds up.

Later in the movie, Guitar Hero 5 serves as the basis for a battle between Vaughn and British comedian Peter Serafinowicz. The song is Billy Squire's "Lonely Is the Night". The head-to-head match features plenty of footage of the game, and even lingering close-ups of the latest revision of the Les Paul. You can't miss an adoring shot of the touch pad.

Although Serafinowicz begins with the proclamation "I play at expert level", he clearly does no such thing. The note chart scrolling down is on hard. The actors mostly ignore the screen and ham it up, doing their best to make it look like Guitar Hero is the most rollicking physical good time this side of Project Natal. To those of us who know the game, it's only slightly less embarrassing than people who stand stock still and unblinking while pretending to rock out. To people who don't know the game, it's going to just reinforce the idea that this is just silliness for boys of all ages.

On the whole, it's a heavy-handed commercial dropped artlessly into a bad comedy. But on the plus side, it's also a free trip to Jamaica for the lucky winners of a corporate sweepstakes.