Guest of dishonour

Reviewed - You, Me and Dupree: Now, I know what you're thinking. Ah, a comedy in which Owen Wilson, the perennial buoyant good buddy, plays a best man, frequently drunk, always genial, who refuses to leave the newly-weds' home.

That's got to be good fun. Matt Dillon and Kate Hudson may not make a particularly appealing couple - she's too perky; he's too mean - but such a scenario, even if it doesn't deliver genuine quality, is guaranteed to generate the odd guilty bellylaugh.

Not a bit of it. There are certainly events worth savouring in the film. A couch gets immolated. Michael Douglas, well cast as the bride's mean father, though somehow still useless, urges his son-in-law to think about having a vasectomy. But the central premise feels uncomfortably thin. The film-makers appear to have considered carefully the constituent elements of the generic romantic comedy and decided to drag one essential minor player - that oaf from whom the hero receives bad advice - boozing and screaming into the foreground. How long will it be before the bride's gay confidant gets his first lead?

Fatally, nobody seems to have decided quite how annoying Wilson's Dupree should be. We, of course, expect the oaf to learn the error of his ways before the credits loom. But Dupree curbs his most appalling instincts within half an hour of the film's start and, before the point where the interval would once have been, has already made friends with the hitherto hostile bride. Everybody knows that the best bits in Groundhog Day are those where Bill Murray is still behaving like a jerk. Isn't Satan the most interesting character in Paradise Lost? Doesn't everyone prefer Mr Burns to Lisa Simpson? Owen Wilson, it is true, has too much charm to ever be totally disagreeable. But he doesn't even seem to be trying here. He's not nearly bad enough to be any good.