Amici Miei is a kind of middle-age buddy picture about five friends who have been through it all together-school, the army, the shock of maturity-and who are determined to fight middle age, together. Bolting from jobs and marriages, they embark on the life of Riley, becoming professional pranksters, concocting elaborate practical jokes that, in their execution, seem more laborious than working for a living. Their brief spasm of existential burlesque leads them smack up against their own mortality when they must bury one of their own. (This is an uncanny bit of foreshadowing in a film written and begun by Pietro Germi and completed by his friend Mario Monicelli after Germi's death one week into the shooting.) Taken as a brittle satire, Amici Miei is perhaps the culmination of a male-oriented comedy genre that nevertheless allows the male ego little slack. Films such as Il Sorpasso, Viva Italia, Le Faro da Padre all in their way concern what Elliott Stein has called "latter-day Vitelloni," grown men who somehow don't have all their emotional parts, and who fill the vacuum with equal measures of braggodocio and cruelty. But Amici Miei is a softer, funnier film than these, and American critics including Andrew Sarris criticized it for a time-honored tradition-"men will be boys"-that now seems as tired as the world-weary faces of Ugo Tognazzi and Philippe Noiret themselves.