'THE SWEETEST THING' LEAVES A SADLY SOUR TASTE.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

The movie ``The Sweetest Thing'' is ... well, it isn't exactly a movie. It's more like a ``Girls Gone Wild Crash a Wedding'' video, with recognizable stars and a few riffs on ``The Rules'' thrown in for ballast.

Young women should relate and guys will see enough flesh and raunchy humor to make the short-but-still-too-long 84 minutes go by painlessly enough. But calling this grab bag of sex skits, pop psychobabble and even a self-announced ``movie montage'' sequence a movie is stretching the definition.

Operating in full ``Something About Mary'' mode, Cameron Diaz plays Christina Walters, the central one of three San Francisco roommates in their late 20s who are still living la vida coed loco.

Heartbreaker Christina likes to brazenly pick up guys at dance clubs, fool around with them for a night or two and never call the devastated fellows again. Lawyer Courtney (``Married ... With Children's'' Christina Applegate, her hair brown and her attitude nicely sardonic in an eroticized Eve Arden kind of way) is also a serial dater, but drawn more to guys she can share the most vapid conversations with. The poor relation of the three is Jane, who is, of course, played by the screen's new queen of sexual humiliation, Selma Blair (``Storytelling,'' ``Legally Blonde''). Awful things happen to Jane, the least of which is the film's most obvious ``Mary'' moment, a hyper-mortifying elaboration of the old hair-gel gag.

Anyway, while trying to hook up Jane with a cute guy at the club, Christina first insults, then has a nice talk with pleasant out-of-towner Peter Donahue (Thomas Jane). He invites her to a hotel bachelor party that she assumes is for his jerk brother (Jason Bateman), but Christina doesn't go. By the next morning, Miss Commitment-phobe realizes she's in love with the guy, but he's already split. Courtney figures out the wedding is in some town about three hours away, and convinces Christina to drive up there with her. The ensuing road trip provides ample opportunity for the two gals to strip down to their underwear, contort themselves into compromising positions in roadside men's rooms and other voyeur-friendly locations, and (in Applegate's case) make vastly deserved fun of Julia Roberts.

Left to her own devices back in the city, Jane gets into exponentially embarrassing trouble, most of which cannot be described in a family newspaper. We will tell you, however, that a purple elephant and a big group sing-along come into play.

All of this is arranged - you can't quite call it directed - by Roger Kumble, who is best-known for staging the Blair-Sarah Michelle Gellar kiss in his first movie, ``Cruel Intentions.'' Obviously, he has a knack for convincing talented actresses to do things they might otherwise not in front of a camera. Just as apparently, that seems to be Kumble's sole filmmaking skill.

Whatever it may be, though, it must be said that ``The Sweetest Thing'' is game, gamy fun as it lurches through its awkwardly structured, stop-and- go plot (the script is credited to ``South Park'' scribe and ``Win Ben Stein's Money'' former co-host Nancy M. Pimental). Until, that is, it stops being a distaff version of a frat boy comedy and gets all teary in the clutch. For that switch to have carried any emotional weight, something like a movie needed to be in front of it.

THE SWEETEST THING - Two and one half stars

(Rated R: sex, language)

Starring: Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate, Thomas Jane, Selma Blair, Parker Posey, Jason Bateman.

Director: Roger Kumble.

Running time: 1 hr. 24 min.

Playing: Citywide.

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Photo:

Thomas Jane and Cameron Diaz chat it up in ``The Sweetest Thing.''