A Guy Thing (PG-13, 2003)

Jason Lee plays Paul, a guy so risk-averse that he gives the "groom" hat at his bachelor party to his best man, so that the dancing "tiki girls" in grass skirts won't pay any attention to him. Yet somehow he wakes up the next morning, hung over, with one of those dancing girls (Julia Stiles) in his bed. It turns out that she is his fiancée's cousin, so she keeps turning up at all the family events.

If you made a copy of a copy of a copy of Meet the Parents and then ran it through one of those script-generating software programs advertised in the back of movie magazines, you might come out with something like A GUY THING, a completely inept attempted screwball comedy without a single memorable moment. There is much faux humor about Paul pretending to have a massive gastro-intestinal disorder, getting an itchy STD and having to get some medication which is discussed loudly in the pharmacy as his future mother-in-law is standing there; the steroid rage of Becky's ex-fiancé, an evidence-planting cop; a rehearsal dinner spiked with pot; and some dirty pictures found by a young boy that end up stuck together, not with glue.

The movie is a step down for everyone associated with it, including director Chris Koch, who made a promising debut with "Snow Day," and Lee, Blair, and Stiles, who show no energy whatsoever. One reason the script seems so much like "Meet the Parents" is that the story is by the same writer, though even four screenwriters could not manage to come up with a single memorable line of dialogue, character to care about, believable motivation, or genuinely funny moment. Every joke and plot development is telegraphed so ham-handedly that it is instantly anticlimactic. There are sit-coms on the WB that have more laughs before the first commercial than this movie has in 90 minutes.