MATTHEW Broderick, who has appeared in one dire film after another since “You Can Count on Me” eight long years ago, rediscovers funny in the rehab comedy “Finding Amanda.”
This feature directing debut by TV vet Peter Tolan (“Rescue Me”) is all over the place tonally, but there are many sharply written laughs in this tale of a sitcom producer named Taylor (Broderick) dispatched by his long-suffering wife (Maura Tierney) to Las Vegas.
Taylor’s assignment is to bring home his teenage niece Amanda (Brittany Snow), a dancer supporting herself as a prostitute and living with a redneck boyfriend (Peter Facinelli) who cheats on her.
Our hero is supposed to deliver Amanda to a rehab facility, but the movie’s main joke is that Taylor is the one most in need of intervention.
A recovering alcoholic with a continuing addiction to the ponies, he uses the trip mainly to overindulge in his vices in sort of a comic version of “Leaving Las Vegas.”
Mr. SJP, whose comic timing largely deserted him in film disasters such as “The Producers,” gets his mojo back with Taylor enduring a long string of humiliations as he sinks lower and lower.
Broderick finds an especially felicitous partner in Steve Coogan, who has a small but rather hilarious part as a sleazy casino host who becomes Taylor’s chief enabler.
Amanda is almost grounded in comparison to Taylor, who is on the verge of being fired from a sitcom even he thinks is horrible and indulges in ecstasy in the movie’s funniest sequence.
Much of “Finding Amanda” doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny, but at its best the still-boyish Broderick suggests his most famous character, Ferris Bueller, going through a midlife crisis.
FINDING AMANDA
You can’t count on me.
Running time: 90 minutes. Rated R (sex, profanity, drugs). At the Sunshine, Houston Street and Second Avenue.