Entertainment

Download & dirty

Just because George Gallo’s “Middle Men” falls short of its appar ent goal to be the “Boogie Nights” of In ternet porn doesn’t mean this loosely fact-inspired serio-comedy isn’t far more entertaining than you’d expect from a film that was dumped into theaters with minimal promotion by Paramount.

Luke Wilson, who has appeared in a long run of bad movies, seizes on his juiciest role since “The Royal Tenenbaums” here. He plays Jack Harris, a Houston businessman who, in 1995, envisions enormous profit potential when he meets a pair of stoners who have invented software that allows anyone in the world to discreetly download porn using a computer and credit card.

Harris, a fictionalized version of producer Christopher Mallick, is introduced to Wayne Beering (Giovanni Ribisi) and Buck Dolby (Gabriel Macht) because they’re already having issues with a Russian mob boss. But Jack deludes himself into believing he can solve his family’s financial problems without getting involved in porn’s seamy side by acting strictly as a middleman.

It’s a naive rationalization that Jack shares with the whistle-blowing hero of Steven Soderbergh’s “The Informant!” Eventually, he’s spending less time with his wife (Jacinda Barrett) and kids back in Texas than with one of his clients, a 22-year-old Internet porn star (Laura Ramsey) in Los Angeles.

By this point, Jack is in deep, thanks to the accidental killing of a bag man sent by the Russian mobster (Rade Serbedzija), a secret side deal by his loose-cannon partners involving child pornography, and an unlikely alliance with an FBI agent (Kevin Pollak) tracking post-9/11 terrorists.

Jack, who places entirely too much faith in his skills as a calm, smooth-talking negotiator — at one point he tries to blackmail a district attorney (a hilarious cameo by Kelsey Grammer) — also has to reckon with a sleazy but well-connected lawyer he’s unwisely cut out of a deal with his partners.

The lawyer is wonderfully played by a foulmouthed James Caan, a hoot who’s working with Wilson for the first time since the latter’s acting debut, “Bottle Rocket.”

“Middle Men” shows evidence of post-production tampering, possibly at the behest of a studio unnerved by the movie’s seamier aspects. The complex flashbacks are sometimes confusingly edited, a problem only partly fixed by wall-to-wall narration.

However uneven, this very well-acted, often amusing and dirty-minded hard-R film still stands out in a sea of market-driven blandness.

lou.lumenick@nypost.com