My big fat weak wedding

"Brevity is the soul of wit," Polonius proclaims in Hamlet. "And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes..." Carve it on director Griffin Dunne's tombstone. Dunne's plodding romantic comedy starring Uma Thurman as the romantic object of two very different men (Colin Firth as the perfectionist fiancé, Richard, and a bloated Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the ostensibly roguish Patrick) is plagued by overplayed gags, telegraphed punch lines and sentiments so trite that one doubts their sincerity.

Thurman is a portrait of overacting as the host of a radio call-in program akin to that of the infamous Dr. Laura Schlessinger (her character's name is Dr. Lloyd). Granted, Thurman's Lloyd is a dumbed-down version of even the dumbest radio personalities on the airwaves, and cannot be accused of excessive moralizing. But her shtick is a spin on the no-nonsense advice columnist pooh-poohing infatuation and touting a "sensible" approach to romantic relationships.

As a side note, continuity was a challenge for Dunne and his team, with Lloyd's program apparently running at all hours of the day and night, with no apparent rhyme or reason to the schedule.

The story takes flight when Lloyd advises firefighter Patrick's fiancé to break off their engagement, causing Patrick to seek revenge. As it happens, revenge is an easy thing to come by when one keeps a trusty computer hacker just downstairs. Patrick takes his pound of flesh in the form of altering public records to reflect the fiction that he and Lloyd are legally married, thus preventing Lloyd's planned marriage to the more respectable Richard. Sparks fly, as the expression goes, when Lloyd tracks Patrick to his Astoria digs to try and set matters right.

As you might expect, the film's narrative eventually brings poor Lloyd to her knees, and force-feeds her a heaping dose of her own vapid expressions. This might sound a touch entertaining to, say, closeted sadists. But, be forewarned: In place of platitudinous nonsense about compatibility and self-respect, the film offers gems like the following: "Sometimes when you're really in love, you just don't sweat the small stuff."

An abundance of genre clichés collide in Mimi Hare and Clare Naylor's hackneyed script. There is a case of mistaken identity that hearkens back to 1996's The Truth About Cats and Dogs, in which Thurman played to her natural type as the prototypical ditsy blond - and which, incidentally, also featured a radio call-in program as its central dramatic component, though Janeane Garofalo's Abby doled out advice about pet care rather than love.

Alcohol lubricates the action early on, transforming Lloyd from an uptight snob into a good-time girl on her first encounter with Patrick. Firth's Richard, a character designed to be mildly repellent, is possibly the most charming character in the mix (when he isn't stuffing his face, or "stress eating," as Lloyd describes it while chastising him). His British aloofness and erudite manner act like balm in Gilead in the face of Morgan's off-key attempts at working-class American chumminess and Thurman's hapless slapstick.           

Sam Shepard appears as Lloyd's smugly all-knowing father, and the actor's misshapen front teeth take center stage when juxtaposed with Thurman's gleaming chompers. Ajay Naidu plays a cartoonishly ethnic pal to Patrick, striking notes reminiscent of Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Coincidence is our watchword as characters stumble implausibly into each other's lives at key moments in order to move the plot along. Even the dim bulbs who scribbled this drivel were clearly aware of the unlikelihood that such chance encounters would occur in a city like New York with such regularity, and they attempt to square this circle with a half-dozen variations on "it's a small world" (my personal favorite being Lloyd's description of the world as "Teeny? like a gimlet").

All roads lead to the chapel in the end - in this case, by way of a Bollywood Bar mitzvah/karaoke festival (seriously) - and Lloyd selects her beau just as we knew she would. The themes of The Accidental Husband are beneath contempt, and were they not crammed repeatedly down the audience's throat, it would probably be unnecessary to point out that the film's notions of love and relationships are uniformly sexist, dated and false.

James Walling can be reached at
jwalling@praguepost.com