STUCK ON YOUDirected by Peter and Bobby Farrelly. Starring Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear,Eva Mendes, Seymour Cassell, WenYann Shih, Cher. 12PG cert, gen release,118 min
Fifteen years after Ivan Reitman's tiresome one-joke Twins paired Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito as unlikely siblings, brothers Peter and Bobby Farrelly push the gag a step further by casting Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear as conjoined twins in the equally laboured and mirthless Stuck On You.
After 32 years of being joined at the hip, Bob and Walt Tenor have made a virtue of their physical phenomenon, excelling at various sports and performing a briskly choreographed double act as they prepare hamburgers in their Martha's Vineyard diner, Quikee Burger. Bob (Damon) is shy and content with small-town life, but Walt is extroverted and harbours acting ambitions, first demonstrated when he stars in Tru, the one-man show about Truman Capote, despite having Bob attached to him on stage.
When Walt decides to pursue his career in Hollywood, Bob reluctantly agrees to join him, so to speak. Mort O'Reilly (Seymour Cassell), an ageing agent stuck in a cultural time warp, takes Walt on as a client and gets him a role opposite Cher in a TV series, Honey And The Beaze. Cher agrees only because she desperately wants out of the tacky show, and she believes that having a conjoined twin as a co-star will destroy the show's ratings. You don't have to be a clairvoyant to figure out the gratingly obvious consequences.
The Farrellys made their name by trading on tastelessness in Dumb And Dumber and Kingpin, hitting their peak with There's Something About Mary before shifting into sharp decline with Me, Myself & Irene and Shallow Hal. An indication of how they have changed their tone is the fact that Stuck On You is being promoted as "filled with hilarity and heart", which translates as gooey sentimentality and patronising condescension, as if it were phoney atonement for past sins.
A very slender concept is stretched all too thinly in the tedious exposition of this trite and inane movie. The finale, evidently driven by sad desperation, features a stage-musical treatment of Bonnie And Clyde that is pathetic to behold. It is simply dreadful, but not so bad that it's funny in the style of the Springtime For Hitler sequence in The Producers.
For reasons best known to herself, Meryl Streep turns up in that sequence and in an earlier scene, playing herself, and there are cameos from Griffin Dunne, Luke Wilson and Jay Leno, who is rivalling Larry King for turning up as himself for pointless movie appearances that supposedly appease US TV viewers.
Damon and Kinnear deliver game performances in their unrewarding roles, getting to share one of the movie's two good jokes when they declare: "We're not Siamese, we're American." The other gag plays on Cher's predilection for younger men, when she is seen in bed with a shirtless Frankie Muniz, the teen star of Malcolm In The Middle.
RATING: *
