How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

There's a trick to playing a crude, lewd, obnoxious jerk and getting audiences to laugh at the spectacle of such loutishness. Alas, it's a trick that Simon Pegg and the folks behind How to Lose Your Friends and Alienate People fail, miserably, to pull off.

An embarassingly unfunny, stumblebum adaptation of Toby Young's memoir about a smug Brit who goes to work for Vanity Fair magazine in New York, director Robert Weide's clunky comedy presents Sidney Young (Pegg) as a boorish London muckraker hired on by Clayton Harding (Jeff Bridges) to bring a little U.K. impishness to the news/celebrity/high society rag called Sharps. Pegg's Young hasn't a clue, however, and before he's even started at the job, he has insulted and offended his higher-up, the bright, pretty Alison Olsen (Kirsten Dunst), also known as the movie's Love Interest.

The Devil Wears Prada skewered the outsize egos and extravagant excesses of the rich, famous and fashionable while offering us commoners a seat at the editorial meetings of a powerful Manhattan publishing operation. The results were smart, snappy, fun. How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, with its fairly detestable leading man and a cast of self-important, and/or self-destructive supporting players, offers a seat in a room you'd never want to be in. Pomposity and foolishness abound, but the laughs are few and far between.

- Steven Rea