Cameron Diaz had her first brush, as it were, with gross-out comedy when she made full use of a new brand of hair gel in There's Something About Mary.
This time she's got a bad taste vehicle of her very own. Unfortunately, it careers out of control into a hideous pile-up of vulgar gags that even the Farrelly brothers would be in two minds about.
It was only a matter of time before some Hollywood hotshot dreamed up the idea that what was good for the guys (American Pie, Me, Myself & Irene and Freddy Got Fingered) was good for the girls.
Cue this embarrassingly derivative tale based around the exploits of San Francisco totty Christina Walters (Diaz), a girl used to doing the dumping rather than the wooing.
Her world is spun round when she meets Peter (Jane), a dashing hunk who intrigues her when he plays it cool and refuses to join the rueful roll-call of conquests.
Egged on by her party-girl flatmates Courtney (Applegate) and Jane (Blair), Christina sets off on a road trip to snare Peter at his brother's wedding in northern California.
Her odyssey is merely an excuse for the film-makers to unleash a barrage of bad taste posing as the emancipation of a trio of go-get-it chicks asserting their independence.
So we get a woeful song-and-dance tribute to the male member, Diaz getting an eyeful in a gents' urinal and Blair suffering an embarrassing case of lockjaw while - well, you have a guess.
The limp - for want of a better word - premise of extracting laughs by placing Diaz & Co in humiliating sexual situations is so old it should really be living in an Eastbourne retirement home.
And it doesn't help that, although the three chums love, laugh and live together, they actually have all the chemistry of a trio of empty test tubes.
Diaz's range of styles from clumsy clowning to doe-eyed insecurity merely grate, Applegate occasionally sparks but Blair is about as funny as her political namesake.
The sweetest thing to do with this offering would be to quietly bury it at the bottom of the bargain bin at Blockbusters.
Tim Evans
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