‘TIS BETTER TO ‘LOSE?’

Pegg Flix Picks to Mock H’w’d Culture

Mixing the tamest celebrity satire with slapstick and poorly executed profanity, the titular presentation of “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People” may be indecently apropos. Top-billed funnyman Simon Pegg somehow simultaneously imbues his ultimately-likable character with humanity, despicability, utter idiocy, and some integrity, the mingling of which is the only interesting buoy in a sea of otherwise completely flat and uninteresting characters. The occasional glimpses of sincerity in the pic scarcely redeem the flatulent noise of the remainder. Expect subdued B.O. and a quiet exit in a few weeks.

I would be remiss not to whine about the cast and characters in this flix. Pegg, utterly talented, but saddled with material that practically has over-acting written into it, is quite remarkable in what he is able to do here. It is damn near impossible to put even twinges of lovability into something so perfectly slimy. Kirsten Dunst, ironically looking sober only in her Dionysian scenes, turns in a flat performance of a flat character. I will credit Gillian Anderson for playing a heartless bitch very most perfectly, but that is not a hard role, nor is it, to crap upon the screenwriters again briefly, a very insightful satire on the agency rep – see “Tropic Thunder” for a tractably better jab. And Megan Fox, her sempiternally agape embrasure sculpted to topographic proportion, barely acts at all as an ambulatory but intelligenceless “it girl” deeply affected only by wounded animals or cocaine. Her vapid character’s role as an actress portraying an oversexed Mother Teresa is peanuts to the insanely funny mock-trailer for “Satan’s Alley” we saw earlier this summer. So, there is comedy to be had here, but none of it is sophisticate and it’s far too infrequent. The satire, scarcely better presented, really kind of misses the mark. “Lose Friends” wants to mock the shallow and commercial, but is nothing but shallow, and commercial.

Those screen-goers immune to clarions of dismal critical reception may turn out for “Lose Friends.” The pic had the rapt attention of the aud I screened it with. They laughed at the rubber-faced slapstick which Pegg seems to have borrowed from fellow countryman Roman Atkinson. They presented with an eerie quietness when Megan Fox dropped to lacy black lingerie. They chuckled at the dentist wizard. They also really liked the trailers for “Role Models” and “Zack and Miri.” I used this last point as calibration to decide that I wasn’t just completely dour when the previous points left me a little less than bemused. It’s just a dumpy film.