Roommates Jane and Eddie share more in common than their lodgings.

They work at the same television station and they are both incredibly beautiful people.

What they don't agree on are such things as love, sex and dating.

Eddie (Hugh Jackman) is a womanizing cad. His bedroom has a revolving door for women he picks up in bars.

Jane (Ashley Judd) is besotted with Ray (Greg Kinnear), another co-worker who is sort of engaged but also sort of on the make.

Jane and Eddie bicker about each other's love lives, all the while zipping around the apartment in their sexy underwear, sharing late night snacks of day old Chinese food.

Heaven's forfend! Will Jane and Eddie never realize that they were made to love each other?

Have they never heard about the attraction of opposites?

Can't they see how utterly gorgeous any children they might produce will be?

Jane and Eddie's dilemma is the subject of Someone Like You a lightweight, formula romantic comedy that is as annoying as it is frivolous.

It has all the elements to make it a hilarious battle-of-the-sexes comedy if only, like its characters, it would refuse to play by the rules.

There's no shortage of laughs because Elizabeth Chandler's screenplay is witty and acerbic.

What Someone Like You lacks is tension.

It's much too obvious that Jane and Eddie are going to get together. It's just a matter of trying to guess what will make them realize what the audience knows 10 minutes into the film.

For about an hour, director Tony Goldwyn almost pulls it all off because he treats the material as if it were one of those old Rock Hudson/Doris Day comedies from the 1950s.

He detracts from the sparring would-be lovers by focusing on the far more interesting supporting characters.

There's Jane's confident Liz (Marisa Tomei) who's a wise-cracking lonely heart herself. Tomei is just doing a comedic riff on her character from What Women Want but it works as well here as it did in that Mel Gibson film. Tomei has the kind of wacky, edgy energy that is effective in small doses.

Ellen Barkin is wonderfully caustic as the diva talk show host.

There is nothing subtle in the way Barkin takes command of every scene she's in giving it a gusto that's missing when Jackman and Judd glove up for their sparring matches.

It's either Jackman and Judd who are far too cautious, or Goldwyn's direction but somebody is making certain that Eddie and Jane are likeable to a fault.

He should be far more sleazy to warrant Jane's disdain. She needs to be considerably more neurotic to warrant his. They need to have grave personality sins not minor pecadillos. There is a promise of chemistry between Jackman and Judd before Eddie and Jane actually become roommates that is never properly realized once they do.

In the novel Animal Husbandry, on which Someone Like You is based, Eddie and Jane don't get together but they are both better people as a result of their shared experiences.

Such things happen in life, novels and even independent movies, but not in a big Hollywood romantic comedy that casts Ashley Judd as a plain Jane who can't seem to get a date. (More on: Someone Like You).

(This film is rated PG)

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