Entertainment

Son of a ‘Bit,’ it couldn’t be worse

What can you say about a 33-year-old Oscar nominee who stars in a rom-com tear-jerker about a nitwit dying of colon cancer?

With the abysmal “A Little Bit of Heaven,’’ Kate Hudson’s possibly unprecedented losing streak remains unbroken: She hasn’t made a good movie since “Almost Famous,’’ 12 long years ago. Even Nicolas Cage can’t say that.

Hudson hits a new low playing a smirking, relentlessly cheery advertising executive who is spared any remotely unphotogenic effects of her fatal condition while flirting with her Mexican-Jewish oncologist (Gael Garcia Bernal) in a piece of unmitigated dreck that’s by turns preposterous, tasteless and laugh-free.

She may be dying, but that doesn’t hold back the hoariest clichés of the romantic comedy genre.

Our heroine is commitment-phobic, we’re told, because of her clueless, long-divorced parents (Kathy Bates, Treat Williams), who have flown to New Orleans, where she lives, hoping for a reconciliation.

This may be the first movie that not only sees terminal cancer as presenting an opportunity for finding true (if short-lived) love, but also for an insurance windfall that fuels a shopping-spree montage. It makes “The Bucket List’’ look positively profound.

Between chemotherapy sessions that miraculously in no way imperil her long blond tresses and have absolutely minimal impact on her appearance, Hudson rides bicycles, hang-glides, goes dancing at a drag club and plans her funeral.

“I want to put the F-U-N back in funeral,’’ she says.

Bernal, who has absolutely no chemistry with Hudson, is almost as terrible in an impossible part. But he does offer a pretty good summary of her character: “I’ve never met anyone who talks so much and says nothing at the same time.’’

“A Little Bit of Heaven’’ is a perfect storm of inanity from which no one escapes unscathed — not director Nicole Kassell (“The Woodsman’’), credited screenwriter Gren Wells, nor such normally reliable actors as Lucy Punch, Romany Malco and Rosemarie DeWitt as Kate’s BFFs, all of whom behave in totally implausible ways.

And did I mention that Whoopi Goldberg turns up as a wisecracking God, who offers Hudson three wishes? And that the title refers to sexual services offered by a swaggering male escort played by Peter Dinklage?

Who knew dying could be such a laugh riot? Certainly not any of us who have actually watched a loved one in the awful final stages of cancer.