‘AMERICAN Idol” and President Bush have few reasons to worry about Paul Weitz’s “American Dreamz,” a cartoonish, unfocused and mostly unfunny satire that doesn’t come within a hundred miles of hitting its two main targets.

Weitz, who co-directed the wonderful “About a Boy” with his brother Chris, and directed the underrated “In Good Company” by himself, has recruited the leading men of both movies – Hugh Grant and Dennis Quaid, respectively – for a farce that must have sounded brilliant on paper.

Grant plays Martin Tweed, the self-aggrandizing host of a massively popular TV talent competition who – out of sheer boredom – decides the new season will include a trio of particularly freakish contestants.

Sally Kendoo (Mandy Moore) is a ruthless redneck of the Britney Spears school with an eating disorder and a nitwit boyfriend (Chris Klein of the Weitz brothers’ “American Pie”) who enlists in the Army, only to be wounded on his first day in Iraq and sent home as a decorated hero.

Equally bumbling is one of Martin’s other key choices, a show tunes-obsessed Iraqi refugee named Omer (Sam Golzari) who the host intends to pit against another contestant, a rap-singing cantor.

Little does Martin suspect that Omer is an al Qaeda sleeper agent competing because it will give him a shot at suicide-bombing the president of the United States (Quaid), who is set as a guest judge on “American Dreamz.”

The appearance was engineered by the president’s chief of staff – Willem Dafoe channeling his inner Dick Cheney/Karl Rove – to prop up the poll numbers for the hapless chief of state.

Played as a broad Bush impersonation by Quaid, President Staton is a depressed recovering alcoholic who parrots speeches the chief delivers to him through an earpiece – and is astounded to learn, when he suddenly starts reading newspapers one day, that “there are three kinds of Iraqis.”

The only kind of Iraqis on view in this movie are cringeworthy stereotypes, including Omer’s swishy cousin (Tony Yalda) and his nouveau-riche aunt (an embarrassing turn by Shohreh Aghdashloo, who was Oscar-nominated for “House of Sand and Fog”).

The Americans don’t fare much better in this scattershot farce, which lurches between four story lines without gaining any comic momentum.

The political satire is toothless, and “American Idol” is already so over the top it’s probably beyond parody.

“That was a joke,” the relentlessly smarmy Martin explains to the humorless Sally, whom he is attempting to seduce. “You didn’t laugh.”

Neither will most Americans likely laugh at “American Dreamz,” a comedy in which the most sympathetic character is a suicide bomber.

AMERICAN DREAMZ

[* 1/2] (One and one-half stars)

Stealth bomb.

Running time: 100 minutes. Rated PG- 13 (brief profanity, sexual references). At the E-Walk, the E. 86th St., the Cheslea, others.

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