Flirting with Disaster.

DAVID O. Russell's wretched first film, Spanking the Monkey --about masturbation and incest -- was made on the cheap but garnered considerable acclaim. On the strength of it, Russell was given a chance to make a major, all-star movie, Flirting with Disaster, which proves equally smutty, sophomoric, and witless. That the vast majority of reviewers found it delightful and hilarious attests to the sorry state of our film criticism, if not indeed our entire culture.

Sexual comedy is a perfectly legitimate genre, but it is unlikely to be well executed by someone who is neither comfortably at home with his subject, nor at a sufficient philosophical remove from it. Flirting with Disaster begins with a fellatio interrupta, about to be performed on Mel by his wife, Nancy, who recently bore their first baby; it ends with the film's credits interspersed with shots of three couples from the film having intercourse in different positions, as if in an illustrated sex manual. In between, the film oozes a self-congratulatory salaciousness, and a sense of the comedic that would not have done a backwoods vaudeville team proud.

Mel is happy enough with his adoptive parents (George Segal and Mary Tyler Moore), identified only as Mr. and Mrs. Coplin, which is typical of a script that treats people as mere plot devices. Yet Mel has entrusted the original adoption agency with tracking down his biological parents; it duly sends Mel, Nancy, and the baby to San Diego and a Mrs. Swaney, Mel's alleged mother. The agency assigns to them a young airhead, Tina Kalb, former dancer and current psychologist, working on a PhD thesis on adoption. She shoots everything with her camcorder, apparently the device with which doctoral theses are written nowadays. Why Mel and Nancy should put up with her is a mystery.

Tina, moreover, is in the midst of a divorce, and plays with the notion of becoming impregnated by the first reasonably intelligent man she might meet. What makes her think that Mel -- written by Russell as a jerk, and portrayed by Ben Stiller as a creep -- is such a reasonably intelligent man is inscrutable; soon enough, though, Mel and Tina are pouncing on each other behind Nancy's barely turned back. Russell's idea of comedy is that whenever two people start going at it, some large object should be overturned with a crash, which allows for increasingly hilarious coitus interruptuses.

Because of a glitch in the agency computer, the San Diego parent proves to be an error, although, like her spacy, blonde twin daughters, an authentic weirdo made nuttier by a farcical Southern accent. Next, Mel, Nancy, Tina, and baby are trekking to the snowy wastes of the Midwest, where a truculent truck driver appears to be the real father. There are delicious misadventures, but the man isn't the real father, after all. The real parents are a pair of ex-flower children, now affluent artists in the Southwestern desert. Yet our Telemachus must first contend with a pair of Feds who want to arrest him for demolishing a post office while learning to drive a truck. These two, it emerges, are a homosexual married couple, one of whom is bisexual enough to enjoy licking women's armpits. He turns out to have been Nancy's high-school beau, so, in due time, she indulges him in his little hobby as they shower together.

Our traveling circus, now augmented by the two Feds, reaches the mansion of the really real parents (Lily Tomlin at her most equine, and Alan Alda), the Schlichtlings, whose name everyone mispronounces, sometimes in scatological ways. These loonies have another son, a morose acidhead who makes mischief I can't go into. Eventually, the adoptive parents also show up on the scene for a game of musical cars, in which everyone mistakes someone else's vehicle for his own, with drastic results. Suffice it to say that Nancy's licked underarm areas are not the only pits the movie attains to.

If only the dialogue had some wit, or the sexual allusions occasionally abated, or someone resembled a human being! But there is no such respite, and Russell has his actors behaving like grinning participants in a demolition derby, with everyone leering at everyone when not winking at the camera.

Tea Leoni cannot invest Tina with even the threadbarest credibility; Lily Tomlin and Alan Alda seem to have overdosed on laughing gas and incurred an indelible smirk; George Segal and Mary Tyler Moore, neither of whom has aged well, behave like commedia dell'arte characters who have lost their arte. Only Patricia Arquette, as Nancy, salvages some dignity (even the baby has a besotted look), but beware of a cast in which she comes off best.