Brothers Bobby & Peter Farrelly are a couple of Rhode Island rascals who struck it rich in Hollywood with juvenile comedies that have lurched from Dumb And Dumber to There's Something About Mary.

Farts, bodily fluids, self-indulgent sexual antics, incest, pus-filled pimples, bad haircuts, braindead characters, animal acts, gross-out behaviour and a litany of politically incorrect issues: This is the metier of these guys as co-writers, directors and film producers.

So the Farrellys have disgusted many and delighted others. But they have never before bored everybody out of their minds -- until now with the dreadful Shallow Hal.

This stumblebum misstep co-stars Jack Black (John Cusack's comic foil in the brilliant High Fidelity) and Gwyneth Paltrow (an Oscar-winner as best actress in Shakespeare In Love, for goodness' sake). So it is not as if the movie was populated with no-talent nobodies.

The problem is the tone, the concept, the execution, the script, the writing, the direction. Shallow Hal is what Hollywood calls "a high concept" movie, which means it is designed to be simplistic and easy to sell.

The story is simple, all right. Black plays a young businessman who, despite being overweight, ugly, and emotionally retarded, lusts only after girls who look like supermodels.

Not surprisingly, especially because he has the charm of a frog, not a prince, he is loveless and clueless. So is his best friend, a similar loser played with a mean spirit, a bad toupee and a vestigial tail (!!!) by Jason Alexander.

Then Black meets self-help guru Tony Robbins (who charmingly plays himself in the movie's best scenes). After lecturing on the power of seeing the beauty that is inside people, no matter how they look outside, Robbins hypnotizes Black. He is not aware of the transformation, and Black now thinks every nice woman he meets is a gorgeous babe.

So, when he runs into the sweet but lonely woman Paltrow plays, he thinks she is an absolute fox. What he doesn't know, but everyone else does, is that she is as big as a hippo. You haven't lived until you see Paltrow trussed up in a fat body suit and looking exactly like Mike Myers' grostesque character Fat Bastard in the Austin Powers movie.

The performers seem lost in the stupidity of the idea and the banality of their dialogue. Paltrow has added insult to her injury when she is in the extreme body suit, although a body stand-in performs in scenes where her face is unseen.

Meanwhile, the movie has a moral lesson to deliver, with a sledgehammer and violins. The Farrellys have finally sold out and made their first feel-good family movie, a genre they are singularly unable to master.

Which, of course, means that Shallow Hal is dull, torpid, lugubrious, insufferable and just plain icky. (More on: Shallow Hal).

(This film is rated PG)

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