A Lot Like Love
There are people who find Ashton Kutcher's every doe-eyed smirk adorable. That would be the college girl in the sorority sweatshirt sitting behind me at the sneak preview for ''A Lot Like Love." There are people who find Ashton Kutcher intensely irritating, like a painful skin condition that just won't go away. That would be me.
The producers of this stillborn romantic comedy are betting there are many more college girls than there are testy movie critics, and they're doubtless correct. That doesn't change the cold, hard fact that their movie is a dog, with fleas.
''Love" doesn't have a plot so much as it has a concept, scribbled in crayon: Boy and girl meet cute and continue to meet cute for seven long years. During that time they bicker and spoon and date other people and move to other cities, but always, in the back of their heads, is the notion of this one person who might complete them if they could only get their acts and priorities together.
It's a good idea for a movie -- that movie being ''When Harry Met Sally," which came out in 1989. ''A Lot Like Love" is a lot like ''Harry," except that the new film's characters are grating, the dialogue inane, and the romance tedious.
''Love" gets off to a mildly rousing start when LA punkette Emily (Amanda Peet) spontaneously jumps the bones of yuppie-slacker Oliver (Kutcher) in the bathroom of a cross-continental flight. Emily wants nothing more than a quick shag, but Oliver tails her around downtown Manhattan and gets to know her, after a fashion. She scorns him as a mama's boy; he replies that he'll be successful in business and love, and dares her to call him in six years to prove it. End of Act 1.
Perversely, Act 2 begins only three years later, when Emily -- now a neurotic Los Angeles actress -- impulsively calls Oliver after a breakup with her boyfriend (Gabriel Mann, passing expressionlessly through the film like a visiting foreign dignitary). The couple seem prepared to connect, but now Oliver is moving to San Francisco to start up an Internet diaper-delivery service with partner Jeeter (Kal Penn).
That's right, Kumar from ''Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" is here, and while ''Love" desperately needs the sort of withering scorn Penn can deliver, the movie sticks him in the best-pal role and forgets about him. Similarly, Ty Giordano offers a refreshing note of naturalism as Oliver's deaf brother, but the character's on hand merely as a signifier of the hero's depth. (Hollywood Rule No. 473: To give your lead character added sympathy, provide him with a friend or relative who has a physical impairment. Or with an ethnic minority. It's all the same.)
Oliver and Emily play relationship tag for a number of years, with hairstyles, period pop songs, and Emily's persona changing throughout. By the fourth act she's a successful photographer, and the only common thread is a flaky self-absorption that would have most men signaling for the check within minutes. Peet can be interesting in films like ''Igby Goes Down" and ''The Whole Nine Yards" -- she's a beauty who's pushy and doesn't care if it makes her look bad -- but the character's small-mindedness here defeats her. Either the filmmakers think it's charming when Emily tailgates an old lady driver and yells ''Get off the road, Grandma!," or they've just stopped caring.
But I'm not sure Pacino and Streep could do anything with Colin Patrick Lynch's dreadful screenplay, which mistakes attitude for wit and keeps setting up punch lines that never arrive, or with the flaccid direction by Nigel Cole (''Calendar Girls," ''Saving Grace").
As for Kutcher, the less said the better. He has yet to give a performance that isn't a dude-acious commentary on his own unwillingness to give a performance, and what once looked like slacker irony is more and more plainly lack of ability. Toward the end of ''A Lot Like Love," Oliver plays Emily a love song on a guitar; the scene seems to consciously ape the ending of last year's ''Before Sunset," except that Kutcher sings in a comic off-key warble that forestalls any actual commitment on the part of the characters or the audience. Like the title says, ''A Lot Like Love" is a romance for people who aren't remotely ready for the real thing.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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