How many times in one movie can a popcorn ball be funny?

There's something a little tired about Gentlemen Broncos, another tale of geeks and losers from Napoleon Dynamite filmmaker Jared Hess.

This newest revenge of the nerds outing involves plagiarism, bad science fiction and Flight of the Conchords' star Jemaine Clement; much as that sounds like a recipe for success, the movie is oddly mean-spirited. You're invited to laugh at the oddball characters, not with them.

Michael Angarano stars here as a home-schooled dweeb named Benjamin Purvis. With a hug and kiss from his weirdo mom (Jennifer Coolidge), Benjamin is off to a special writer's workshop camp.

On the bus to camp he makes friends with an obnoxious girl called Tabatha (the gifted Halley Feiffer), who demands hand massages and money for tampons. She and her buddy Lonnie (Hector Jimenez) talk about their novels and video projects, leaving Benjamin feeling very inferior. Still, he allows her to read his most important work, Yeast Lords.

(Scenes from Yeast Lords, an overwrought piece of juvenile sci-fi, are acted out in wildly stupid fantasy sequences that star Sam Rockwell, along with flying stags and various cyclops.)

At camp, Benjamin is thrilled to discover that his favourite writer, Dr. Ronald Chevalier (Jemaine Clement) will be giving a talk on character names. Vaguely new age and a legend in his own mind, Chevalier is a pompous git made fully three dimensional by Clement's spectacular performance.

As it happens, Dr. Chevalier hasn't written anything worth publishing in ages.

Then he gets his hands on Yeast Lords, and all that changes. Benjamin is about to get life lessons in plagiarism, bad home movies and motherly wisdom.

Gentlemen Broncos is constructed of endlessly awkward moments and ungainly people, including Mike White as a sort of perverse big-brother character and John Baker as a gun-toting lecher. Only Jemaine Clement and Sam Rockwell make their characters seem alive, which suggests performance can trump weak writing, but nobody really gets out of this thing with anything approaching grace. (And haven't we seen Jennifer Coolidge as this good-hearted wacko before? As the mom, Coolidge designs nightgowns and makes popcorn balls for extra cash, all no doubt intended to make her look eccentric. Instead, she just seems pathetic.)

Lest we forget, Gentlemen Broncos contains the requisite number of gross-out visual jokes, most of them involving bodily functions.

Barf, nerds, other weird outcasts, embarrassing adults and awkward art -- all the de rigueur parts are here for a loser comedy.

Well, all except heart.

(This film is rated PG)

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