Here's a movie about the real-life guy who invented the intermittent windshield wiper and his 16-year court battle against Ford to prove he invented it. Sounds nice but a little dull, doesn't it?

Well, that about nails it -- that and the fact that it takes as much screen time as Clint Eastwood took to invade Iwo Jima.

Nice-guy Greg Kinnear actually succeeds in painting dark strokes on his portrayal of Bob Kearns, a college engineer professor who gets the bright idea of using a combination of resistors and capacitors to make car wipers work more slowly in light rain.

We don't get that picture at first. In the full glow of "eureka!" and amid the promise of riches when he and his partner Gil (Dermot Mulroney) get the soft-soap welcome from the president of Ford (Mitch Pileggi), Kearns seems more like the indefatigable wide-eyed salesman he played in Little Miss Sunshine.

But when Ford pulls a dirty trick and announces it has its own wiper system (a clear ripoff of Bob's), a

trigger goes off in his brain. Standing against a giant automaker with canyon-deep pockets, he loses the confidence of Gil, then of his lawyer (Alan Alda, who gives a great speech about settlement -- "This is what justice looks like, they cut you a cheque"), then his wife (lustily played by Lauren Graham).

Thus does a milquetoast college professor turn into Capt. Ahab, defending himself in a years-long court battle, aided by his kids, a kind of Brady Bunch legal team.

I don't know if Kearns' monomania needed two hours to do it justice, but director Marc Abraham thinks it does. The acting is fine. What's missing is drama.

Ford doesn't hire killers or goons, they just keep upping the settlement offers into the stratosphere for Kearns to turn down. Repeat and stir.

(This film is rated PG)

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