film | Bohemian, don't like you

YOU, ME AND DUPREE? I hate all three of them, and here's why:

A) Dupree: He's one of those pathologically reckless screw-ups you only find in really forced comedies, and with Owen Wilson lending the role his usual hangdog obliviousness, the film sputters and wheezes in its attempt to portray him as an adorably free-spirit kook who means well but leaves an inadvertent trail of chaos and irritation in his wake. Yeah, no dice. He bugged the shit outta me, but so did ...

B) You and me: Not sure exactly who's who, but together they're Carl (Matt Dillon) and Molly (Kate Hudson), nice, calm yuppie newlyweds who open their cute little home to Dupree — Carl's best friend — after he loses his job and apartment. Destructive shenanigans ensue, of course, over and over and over, enabled by Carl and Molly's insane refusal to show Dupree the door after he orders cable without their permission, intrudes upon their foreplay without knocking, and incinerates their living room during a candlelit tryst with a Mormon librarian. (Wait, a Mormon librarian?! OMG! LOL!) Actually, following that last folly, they do kick him out, but he's back in less than 10 minutes; when they come across him mopishly sitting on a park bench in a torrential downpour with nowhere to go, Molly inexplicably melts into a puddle of Dupree-coddling goop — that whole house-torching deal? nothing a fun-fun Clash musical montage can't fix! — while a jealous Carl morphs from understandably annoyed into an enraged psychotic.

And what about how Carl's dictatorial boss (Michael Douglas) — also Molly's father — incites unnecessary bickering when Carl pisses off Molly by working late on a Very Important Project? Hello, why doesn't Carl just be honest and tell her that her dad is an overbearing jerk, who, by the way, insists Carl get a vasectomy for no reason that I can discern. That's typical of You, Me and Dupree: With the exception of the great Seth Rogen (The 40-Year-Old Virgin), who provides all five of the movie's chuckles as Dillon's whipped buddy, all of the characters are puppets of a story that jerks them into outlandish behavior that's not even funny on an extreme level, and while the actors appear to be having a ball, the mirth stays on the screen. Wilson's last star vehicle was the infectiously good-time Wedding Crashers. Comparatively, this film could be called Buzz Killers. D+