Entertainment

Wall Street romance, ‘The Good Guy’ just shooting banks

Meet Tommy (Scott Porter — a k a Jason Street on “Friday Night Lights”). He’s “The Good Guy,” ostensibly, a trader at a big Wall Street bank who’s been dating Beth (Alexis Bledel) for three months.

They don’t seem to have much in common. Plus, he’s always at work or hanging with his boys. Their conversations are about things like their both being left-handed, and her thoughts of moving to San Francisco.

Tommy’s protégé at work, the younger Daniel (Bryan Greenberg), calls Tommy for dating advice about the girl he likes — who turns out to be Tommy’s girlfriend. When Daniel finally gets to know Beth, they have conversations along these scintillating lines: “So what was your favorite country that you’ve been to?”

“The Good Guy,” which hopes that throwing in constant references to “The Good Soldier” will give it literary heft, is not just a shabby “Wall Street” knockoff clogged with dull, jargon-spewing

trading-desk scenes that fail to advance the plot in any way. It’s also a nondescript “Sex and the City” retread that gives Beth lots of dull screen time to chat about relationships with her girlfriends over cocktails or bikini waxes.

The girls’ zingers include lines like, “He’s polite and early. He’s gay.” The boys’ range from Wall Street-caveman grunting (“This is not sleep-away camp. Your job is to make me rich. Period.”) to weirdly unfunny locker-room chatter (“I want to touch her where she pees”).

Porter, who channels early-’80s Tom Cruise (lots of randomly poking his index fingers in the air), is cocky without being intense or interesting. He seems less a Master of the Universe than a head waiter at an Applebee’s in New Jersey.

Bledel is as sweetly boring as ever, and yet both are saved from giving the worst performance in the piece by the guy who plays Tommy’s ruthless, domineering boss — Andrew McCarthy.

There is a reason why McCarthy doesn’t get hired to play a sharking alpha male very often. When he makes an effort to work his features into a frenzy of boiling testoster-

one, he looks like a petulant third-grader. Your impulse is not to throw yourself into closing the next deal but to buy him a coloring book.