Every so often a movie comes along that’s so lame, you can almost make out a “What the hell am I doing here?” thought bubble over an actor’s head.
This seems to be the case with Olivia Munn, looking dismayed to find herself in “The Babymakers,” the latest feature from director Jay Chandrasekhar (“Beerfest,” “Super Troopers”). It’s an honest mistake — Chandrasekhar’s previous Broken Lizard comedy troupe films, while juvenile, weren’t this bad, and they certainly weren’t this mean-spirited.
Munn and Paul Schneider are married couple Audrey and Tommy, eager to have a baby, who discover his sperm count isn’t what it ought to be — possibly due to a lifetime of his being slammed in the crotch by various objects, as we see in flashback montage.
The nut-shot, an easy identifier of screenplays that aren’t even trying, is only the tip of the ick-berg here, stuffed in among the gay caricatures, the humorless, gossipy women, the prison-rape jokes and the horny-straight-guy shtick: At one point, Tommy masturbates to a food magazine photo of two cantaloupes. (Axe Body Spray peeps, take this one and run with it.)
Determined to knock up Audrey, Tommy hatches a plan with some buddies (Kevin Heffernan, Nat Faxon) to steal back sperm he donated to a cryobank years ago, when his “boys” were in better condition. And yes, if you’re wondering, someone does actually utter the line, “This is a bank job. A sperm bank job.”
Chandrasekhar, reliably funny on-screen, casts himself in the film’s one semi-amusing role, as a former Indian mafioso who agrees to mastermind the heist. With his voice-activated flat-screen blaring Bollywood while he sweatily snorts coke off a knife blade, you kind of want the film to switch gears and just be about him. But alas.
Munn, meanwhile, gets about three funny lines at the outset before morphing into a cartoonishly uptight wife, oblivious to her husband’s dirty, dirty mind (“How many times have you masturbated in your life — like 100?”) and obsessed with all things infant-related.
By the time she has to giggle at Tommy’s joke about how there are no female serial killers — because after they murder the first one, they can’t help blabbing about it to their friends! — you just want to take her aside and gently reminisce about the time she was in “Magic Mike” earlier this summer. Schneider, a likable actor who does a good beta-male seethe, seems similarly blindsided. (He left “Parks & Recreation” for this?)
The image that really summed it up for me — spoiler alert! — was the guy flailing around in abject horror on a floor covered with spilled semen. It’s a last gasp of that type of frat-boy humor in which “gay” is the ultimate insult. But in a culture where Anderson Cooper is out and gay-inclusive shows like “Modern Family” are wildly popular, a dud like “Babymakers” doesn’t even find sticking power in its offensiveness. It just wipes off.
sstewart@nypost.com