On DVD: "Date Night"

"This is all just a big, goofy misunderstanding," insists Steve Carell to the gun-toting goons who've mistaken him and his wife (Tina Fey) for blackmailers - and, in doing so, Carell rather reviews Date Night for us. The leads play suburban squares who, in a bid to pep up a complacent-growing relationship, swipe another couple's reservation at a swanky Manhattan restaurant; trouble is, the absent couple have made off with a laptop's flashdrive containing incriminating information, and thus incurred the wrath of Mob boss Ray Liotta.

The film has been assembled with the professionalism we've come to expect from Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum), the producer-director whose gifts (eyes on efficiency and profitability, access to all the best casting agents) belong firmly in the former camp: Date Night has been shot in the new digital-video format, not to venture a Collateral-style experiment in finding disorientating new textures in the night, rather to reduce costs and shooting schedules; the result, accordingly, looks cheaper and feels more dashed-off than its 1980s and 90s comedy antecedents.

It's the leads who rescue Date Night from its own disposability. If the suspicion again is that Carell and Fey have been cast for the normalcy of their looks rather than the funniness of their bones, and that only a handful of lines in Josh Klausner's workmanlike screenplay would make it onto an episode of 30 Rock or The Office, the stars are (at this stage in their movie careers) game indeed; their timing - honed by the annual recording of 13-24 episodes of the sharpest television around, which may be as close as we come these days to the cranked-out comedies of the studio era - is as impressive as ever, and they spark well off both one another, and the array of guest stars Levy assembles for them.

If we are going to have this kind of slick, high-concept multiplex filler, we conclude, better it should be populated by amiable funny people than by, say, Gerard Butler. Still, the best one might declare of Date Night is that it functions: while no substitute for an evening in on the sofa with access to a 30 Rock boxset and somebody you love, as an 85-minute part of the package for a first or second date, or alternatively an option for a night away from your own offspring, it might very well do the job.

Date Night is available on DVD from Monday.