HARD TO FERRET OUT WHO WOULD LIKE 'POLLY'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

YOU'VE GOT Ben Stiller in his current, overexposed comedy slump. You've got a ``Friends'' star squeezing in her summer hiatus movie; a ``Will & Grace'' star, too. You've got the guy who made the oddball indie ``Safe Men'' and wrote ``Meet the Parents'' directing his first big studio picture. You've got a film that wants to be ``Something About Mary''-outrageous within PG-13 parameters. You've got Hank Azaria with a French accent and no swim trunks. You've got a blind ferret.

If that all sounds like a recipe for disaster, rest assured that it is. ``Along Came Polly'' takes the oldest romantic comedy notion that there is - opposites attract - and does absolutely nothing new or even clever with it. The movie, in fact, can barely get the opposites thing to register, since its lead characters are too thinly drawn to make much of an impression one way or another.

From what we're told, though, Stiller's Reuben Feffer is a risk-assessment expert for some high-rent, New York insurance-advising outfit. Making a connection so obvious that you wonder where the joke writer went, director John Hamburg's script presents Reuben as an unadventurous soul who doesn't like to take chances.

This proves his undoing during a Caribbean honeymoon with bride Lisa (Debra Messing). When Azaria's aforementioned naked Frenchman invites them on a scuba outing, Reuben chickens out and leaves Lisa alone on Claude's boat. The obvious, as we've quickly come to expect of this movie, happens.

Alone again in Manhattan, Reuben runs into a school acquaintance, Jennifer Aniston's Polly Prince. She's lived in a bunch of places and barely held down menial jobs since last they met; she also has a funky downtown apartment and that sight-impaired weasel, so you know she's kooky.

Anyway, Reuben and Polly have a disastrous first date that concludes with another of Stiller's patented bathroom traumas. But Polly is so, well, kooky, that she wants to go out again a few days later. Reuben quickly learns that this is her standard m.o.; constantly changing her mind and unable to commit at 3 to dinner at 6, Polly is anything but what a guy who only wants stability is looking for.

But they have great sex. And she loosens him up a bit. Then a repentant Lisa returns, seeking forgiveness. Oh, the complications ... if you've never seen a romantic comedy before in your life, anyway.

Since the central triangle really doesn't generate laughs, extreme efforts were made to pack the movie with ker-ray-zee supporting characters. Reuben's best friend is a has-been child actor (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who's so egocentrically pathetic that he's happy to have an ``E! True Hollywood Story'' crew follow him around. As Reuben's vulgar boss, Alec Baldwin contributes a long urinal monologue. Some sweaty fat guy plays one-on-one basketball. And Bryan Brown portrays your typical Australian business mogul who can't locate the boundary between lust-for-life thrill-seeking and boneheaded masochism.

So the French guy and the ferret have a lot of company. But at the triangular center of ``Along Came Polly,'' hardly anybody exists.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

ALONG CAME POLLY - One and one half stars

(PG-13: nudity, sex, language)

Starring: Ben Stiller, Jennifer Aniston, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Debra Messing, Hank Azaria, Bryan Brown, Alec Baldwin.

Director: John Hamburg.

Running time: 1 hr. 30 min.

Playing: Wide release.

In a nutshell: Mirth-impaired opposites-attract comedy is too timid and unimaginative to be Stiller's next ``There's Something About Mary.''

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Ben Stiller, as a man who avoids risk, dates Jennifer Aniston, an impulsive free spirit, in ``Along Came Polly.''