ALONG CAME POLLY
(two stars)
Stale formula comedy.
Running time: 90 minutes. Rated PG-13 (sexual content and gross-out humor). At the Cineplex Village VII, Kips Bay, 34th Street, others.
THE fact that “Along Came Polly” was written and directed by one of the writers of “Meet the Parents” and “Zoolander” might give you hopes of comedy of the same order.
They would be in vain.
On the evidence of this lazy, lackluster film, it seems all too likely that John Hamburg’s comic imagination was not the key to either of those Ben Stiller triumphs.
“Along Came Polly” recycles gags from various, more successful gross-out and romantic comedies, but without any zest or imagination.
There’s a joke about a super-noisy, pre-explosive upset stomach (see “National Lampoon’s Van Wilder” and “American Pie”), a lover vocally trying not to ejaculate too soon (ripped directly off “Singles”), a pet that gets banged around (“There’s Something About Mary”) and more.
Making matters worse, the film makes a bland hash of its stale romance premise, uptight boy keen on wild and crazy girl. It’s like a dumbed-down, embarrassingly square “Something Wild” made by someone who’d heard of the film but never saw it.
It all begins pleasurably enough at the wedding of a control-freak risk assessor, Reuben Feffer (Stiller), and Debra Messing’s JAP-py real estate dealer, Lisa Kramer, at which Reuben’s crude boss, Stan (Alec Baldwin), gives an enjoyably embarrassing speech.
But on the first day of their honeymoon at St. Barts, Lisa takes up with a French scuba instructor (Hank Azaria, pumped up and chest-shaven like a Chelsea gym-boy) and Reuben immediately flies back to New York to find that news of his humiliation has outpaced him.
With the help of his best friend, Sandy (Philip Seymour Hoffman), he goes about finding a replacement for Lisa – and within two weeks, he unaccountably fixates on Polly (Jennifer Aniston), with whom, it turns out, he went to grade school.
Back then, she was a serious student and a delegate to the Model U.N. – now she’s a wild downtown chick who has lived in Thailand, keeps a pet ferret and takes Reuben out to “underground” salsa clubs.
It isn’t clear why – or even if – she’s attracted to Reuben or why he falls for her flakiness and penchant for leaving rambling phone messages.
But it’s clear they’re going to end up together, even though Lisa reappears on the scene – and long before the sequence when Reuben has to race through the streets to stop Polly from leaving town.
Stiller is reprising a familiar and nebbish persona, but Aniston’s big-screen potential (see, for instance, “Office Space”) is cruelly wasted.
Writer-director Hamburg seems to think it’s a big, daring deal that her character has a tattoo (good heavens!) and goes to ethnic restaurants.
Baldwin and Hoffman manage to make something of their equally sketchy characters – indeed, the film livens up every time they appear – but they do so by sheer force of talent and in spite of their material.
