Entertainment

DATE AND SWITCH

THE Farrelly Brothers have jumped the orifice. “The Heartbreak Kid” is so laugh-poor that it shoves all its comedy chips on a bet that you can build a movie around nose gags. Stuff goes into nostrils (a chili pepper), stuff comes out (a giant pill, apple juice). Sigh.

Ben Stiller plays Eddie, a guy who, on Valentine’s Day, attends the wedding of an ex-fiancée. He listens politely while the father of the bride announces that every one of her previous boyfriends was an anal aperture.

So: Ben Stiller gets emotionally humiliated? His heart is getting kicked in the crotch? A fresh approach, but the Farrellys don’t do emotions. Pretty soon, Stiller is back to the old routine: getting beaten with a bat and peed on.

Meeting Lila, a tall blonde (Malin Akerman, who must be making Cameron Diaz wonder if any of her DNA is missing), Stiller’s Eddie senses she could be the one – but six weeks into their romance, she announces work is forcing her to move to Rotterdam (“Why Germany?” he asks, an inch-high gag that nevertheless towers over most of the others). Her job doesn’t force married people to move, though. Wedding bells tinkle, and soon so do other things.

On a honeymoon in Mexico, Lila gets increasingly irritating, although not in interesting ways. She sings along to every song on the radio and she’s too dumb to use sunscreen. In bed, she is strange.

While she’s recuperating from a sunburn in her room, Eddie hangs out in the bar and downs shots with a family of yokels (they have names like Buford and love Subway sandwiches) whose hottest member, Miranda (Michelle Monaghan), flirts him up with dull thoughts about how people should live permanently in resorts. Yep, that’s reason enough to ditch your wife on your honeymoon. So that’s what Eddie schemes to do, though Miranda doesn’t know he’s married in the first place because in this movie no one has heard of wedding rings.

The wife is supposed to be so bizarre that you’ll hate her, but their lack of chemistry could just as easily be blamed on Eddie’s failure to spend much time in the lab. Could he really know so little about her after six weeks, or even six minutes? Lila is weird, but ditching her on the honeymoon would be psychotic, and he seems no more torn up than if she’d caught him watching porn. Meanwhile, Miranda’s chief selling point is that she isn’t immediately irritating, but the movie keeps saying that women will annoy you eventually.

As the actors’ noses get abused, so does your patience. Long stretches go by with musical interludes but without punch lines. The jokes we do get involve characters telling each other they’re gay, crusty gags about cringing husbands taking orders from drill-sergeant wives, dirty-talking old people (Jerry Stiller shows up as Eddie’s dad), and some of the most up-to-the-minute slang of 1999 (“bros before ho’s”).

A mariachi band keeps popping up to play “La Cucaracha” – which shows about how far this movie goes into Mexican culture – and Eva Longoria demeans herself in a cameo. This remake of the 1972 comedy – written by Neil Simon and featuring Charles Grodin and Cybill Shepherd – is the least funny movie ever from the makers of “There’s Something About Mary.” (I even liked “Me, Myself & Irene” and semi-enjoyed “Stuck on You.”) Despite help from a bunch of other writers, the Bros. Farrelly can’t even come up with decent gross-out gags, much less serviceable this-is-how-they-fall-in-love dialogue. Their big set piece is a kitty that’s furrier than a shag rug, and I’m not talking about a cat.

When the movie announces its big theme – “Bitches be crazy!” – a girl behind me at the screening actually called out, “Oh no he dit-int!” Yes, ma’am. Yes, I’m afraid he did.

kyle.smith@nypost.com

Running time: 115 minutes. Rated R (profanity, sex, nudity, drug use, crude humor). At the Lincoln Square, the Orpheum, the 34th Street, others.