Mr Right is oh-so wrong

Like When Harry Met Sally, this comedy deals with a man trying to change a friendship with a girl into a deeper relationship involving both love and sex. Unfortunately, that is where the resemblance to that romcom classic ends.

Just Friends is about as witless an American comedy as there has been this Millennium, with a central character so obnoxiously cocky and loathsomely violent that it's a major surprise he isn't played by Adam Sandler.

Ryan Reynolds (who has delivered abject performances previously in Van Wilder: Party Liaison and the recent, dismal remake of The Amityville Horror) plays a fat boy who is best friends with the cutest cheerleader in high school (Amy Smart) but can't get taken seriously as a boyfriend.

It's equally hard for us to take the high school seriously, as it seems to be populated entirely by people who look over 30.

The reason for this is that most of the movie takes place ten years on, when our hero has miraculously lost ten stone. (How he achieved that makeover might have made a more interesting picture.)

Now, he is a slim, successful record executive given the job of baby-sitting an impossible rock star (Anna Faris, playing a more nightmarishly untalented, unhinged version of Courtney Love).

Events conspire to make their plane land in New Jersey, where they spend Christmas with our hero's family, and he tries to get back together with his high-school sweetheart.

This could have been the premise for a reasonable comedy. Anna Faris somehow manages to get a few laughs as the ghastly rock star, despite a script that never gives her anything even slightly amusing or credible to say.

Amy Smart manages to be cute and adorable with even less help from the script, director or leading actor, with whom she has zero chemistry (and who can blame her).

The script is insultingly stupid and illogical. But what really sinks the movie is the fact that the leading character is loathsome: the quintessence of the Ugly American. He's so idiotic, boorish and aggressive that it boggles the mind that he's meant to be the nice guy.