Entertainment

Don’t ‘Think’ about it

We’ve all been told that throwing yourself at someone will only make you less desirable. So it goes with this vaguely movie-like infomercial for Steve Harvey’s best-selling love-advice book of the same title. The more this alleged romantic comedy begs you to adore it, the more you wish you could block its calls.

Certainly seeing the movie obliterates any need to read Harvey’s folksy, 100 percent retro “Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man,” since the concepts are underlined constantly. And I do mean underlined, via at least a dozen shots of highlighter markers running over bullet points like “boys shack, MEN build homes.”

“Think Like a Man” looks at the love lives of a group of mostly African-Americans in Los Angeles — breaking them into a series of matchups: There’s the Mama’s Boy (Terrence J) versus the Single Mom (Regina Hall); the Dreamer (Michael Ealy) versus the Woman Who Is Her Own Man (Taraji P. Henson); and the Non-Committer (Jerry Ferrara) versus the Ring Girl (Gabrielle Union).

The film also pits the Player (Romany Malco) versus the 90-Day Girl (Meagan Good) — 90 days is how long she’s supposed to “keep the cookie in the cookie jar.” That last gem says it all about this movie’s coy substitutes for love, lust or wit.

Between dates, the women drink wine and tell each other that having their very own hardcover Harvey tome has given them a new attitude. The men play basketball and dissect their romances with a fervor that would strike the “Sex and the City” ladies as somewhat excessive.

There are too many couples. And there’s no suspense, since we’re hardly going to get a screenplay that suggests Harvey’s bromides don’t actually work.

The sole visual interest comes not from director Tim Story (“Barbershop”) but from the actors. Most are devastatingly attractive and talented, though the ersatz Jerry Lewis voice and tics of Kevin Hart (as the Happily Divorced Guy) are an acquired taste.

Advice books presume that human behavior can be broken into a small number of highly predictable patterns. Movies thrive on individuality and at least the illusion that we can surprise each other from time to time.

Shove people into categories, then into a film like “Think Like a Man,” and it’s a recipe for tedium.