‘I Love You, Man,” which is like listen ing to a 105-minute conversation be tween Ross and Joey on “Friends,” looks like it might be a Judd Apatow movie in the same way Brett Favre, in a Jets uniform, looked like he might still know how to play quarterback.
Instead of Grade A prime Apatow, we get ground Hamburg.
The movie is by writer-director John Hamburg, who shared writing credit with three others on “Meet the Parents” but was the sole visionary behind “Along Came Polly.”
Paul Rudd plays a real-estate agent (he’s selling Lou Ferrigno’s mansion, in a setup for a joke no one ever got around to writing) who has no male friends. He is more comfortable around women, for whom he enjoys making Martha Stewart-ish snacks. His best night ever? The one he spent watching “Chocolat” with his fiancée (Rashida Jones).
His wedding is coming up, and he needs a best man. So naturally he does what most guys do he picks his brother (Andy Samberg). The end.
I wish. Instead, time to dial up some tedious sitcommery. He goes on the Internet to search for a “man-date” (one of dozens of arthritic catchphrases that shamble through this creaking script). He auditions guys. One of them acts inappropriately at sporting events. One of them is 89. One of them turns out to be gay. Ha ha.
After far too much of this, Jason Segel lopes into the frame as the guy’s guy. He lives in a “man cave” (drums, guitars, La-Z-Boys, bong, elaborate masturbation equipment).
Segel is too mellow, too much the punching bag he played in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” to do the Seann William Scott/Owen Wilson part, but the movie manages to deal out a few agreeably strange moments in male bonding, such as when the two ride a Vespa while singing Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” and a funny sequence involving billboards.
We get dirty jokes that aren’t funny, and clean jokes that aren’t funny. Segel’s dude has named his dog Anwar Sadat. Rudd keeps trying to deliver man-patter and coming up with weirdly mangled words. “Totally!” he says. “Totes magotes!”
What we don’t get, ever, is a reason to care. The stakes could not be lower if we were talking about an exhibition game between the two worst teams in the WNBA. Who cares if a fussy real-estate agent lands a best man for his wedding?
If you’re going to send up the rom-com genre (should-I-call-him scene, breakup scene, rush-to-the-wedding scene), repeating all clichés is not the way to do it. Nor are things enlivened much by deeply wrong speeches on what it means to be a guy from Segel, who says things like, “We’re barbarians, after all. Every once in a while I go down to the boardwalk and throw my feces like a gorilla.”
Manly men don’t say “feces,” Little Lord Fauntleroy.
He also says, “I’ve got an ocean of testosterone flowing through my veins.” File that under statements that are automatically untrue if you have to say them. Note that this line did not appear in “True Grit.”
Guys don’t talk like this, nor do two men who barely know each other (or even two men who’ve known each other for 20 years) ask about each other’s sexual habits.
Nor would a straight guy and a gay guy make it through an intimate dinner together without both of them making it clear where they stand. Watching this movie is like listening to Michael Jackson tell you what real men are like.
I LOVE YOU, MAN Bro, no. Running time: 105 minutes. Rated R (profanity, crude sexual references, drug references). At the Lincoln Square, the E-Walk, the 34th Street, others.