McConaughey stepped in at the last minute to replace Owen Wilson in the role of pampered star Ben Stiller’s obsequious agent, Rick Peck. It’s easy to see how the role would have suited McConaughey’s fellow Texan, but he makes the part his own, bringing to it the manic energy tighter than his own kinky perm.
He’s a BS artist who has long since succumbed to his own sales pitch, to the point where anything less than getting his client the TiVo package to which he’s contractually entitled as a perk will cause him to lose face professionally. He reacts with something less than moral horror when studio chief Tom Cruise offers him a fat bribe to let his client die in the jungle as a write-off, but the TiVo matter sets him off and sends him to the wilds of Southeast Asia to make sure that, even in the remote wilderness, Stiller still has the DVR the studio promised him. Absurd, yes, but McConaughey is clearly on the same wavelength as Stiller, Cruise, and the rest of the cast, all of them mercilessly sending up the protective-bubble mentality that (viewers imagine) characterizes Hollywood bigwigs like themselves.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA2ziAAXoqE]