How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (Deluxe Edition)

Alternate title: How to Lose a Reviewer in 10 Minutes (give or take). Let me not count the ways.

Oh, okay, here’s how!

Step One: Have Matt McConaughey lose his shirt, even in his own ad-agency office, by his second scene. This will reveal just how typical your little flick already is.

Take Two: Introduce Kate Hudson as a completely vapid protagonista, one who works at a Cosmo-esque magazine (but of course), who will waste no time in becoming uninteresting, and with amazingly bad hair at that. Her character’s name? Andi Anderson. What else?

Step Three: Usher in the age-old concept of a bet in which one character will seduce another, only to drop that person later. This time, though, have it both ways, man and woman both intending to snare before bailing. What, saw this in She’s All That, et al? Well, this movie, too, will include a scene over which plays Sixpence None the Richer’s “Kiss Me.”

Four: Insert the gorgeous Michael Michele, she who once graced the closing seasons of Fox’s Homicide: Life on the Street (arguably the best-written cop show ever), as herself a thoroughly deplorable con in this matter – well, she does work in advertising – who has a vendetta against coworker Ben (Matty Mac) for whatever reason.

Five: Wait in anticipation for the coming collective groan of audiences everywhere (or at least from those persons with IQs over 40) as they realize nothing will be more intolerably annoying to watch than these two faux-falling for each other and avoiding happiness at all clichéd costs.

Six: Show plainly early on that you intend to waste the supremely talented Bebe Neuwirth, a one-time vamp-tastic Velma Kelly in the stage production of Chicago. Reduce her to a prototypical version of Meryl Streep’s ice queen in The Devil Wears Prada, minus the bark or the bite.

Seven … oof, this is exhausting. Stop.

Here we have Kate Hudson doing everything subhumanly possible to incite Matt McConau-mosity (making her would-be man miss The Game, turning down his exquisite cooking claiming vegetarianism, dubbing his penis Princess Sophie, etc.) and reaping none of that stuff whatsoever. She will gift him a disgusting dog that could’ve been Ugly Mutt of the Decade; she will swaddle it in Burberry; she will trick him into attending a Celine Dion concert (ho, ho, ho); and she will overact from start to finish in a way that no sane gent couldn’t latch onto, or stand for. (To be fair, the Ben schmuck calls her “sugarpuss” – to her face, yes. What self-respecting lass puts up with that?)

After all that, what works? Well, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days clocks in under two hours. That’s about it. What this flimsy flick boils down to is, in a word, paycheck.

Special features in this deluxe-edition DVD include “How to Make a Movie in 2 Years” (yea, two years), director’s commentary, and – wait for it – a Keith Urban music video. Well, well – yahtzee! “Why the Sexes Battle” and “Girls Night Out” featurettes come, too; you might as well earnestly tear through He’s Just Not That Into You and take copious, pointless notes.

Director Donald Petrie is better than this. He ignited Julia Roberts’s career with Mystic Pizza, put incomparable hucksters Matthau and Lemmon to (outstanding) work in Grumpy Old Men, and restarted Sandra Bullock’s own rom-com standing with Miss Congeniality.

Also better than this, despite a rash of movies in the same vein (Fool’s Gold together, more mercifully apart from one another), are Hudson and McConaughey. Daughter of Goldie locks in the viewer to her on-screen presence, even if the material gives her sand to stand on, and Matt McShirtless has an easy charm that, even in this thin vehicle, nearly makes the notion believable that a narcissistic girly girl could fall in lob with this likewise-navel-gazing beefcake.

In the end what’s obvious here is the masquerade of a movie putting itself on as chock-full of gumption when, in reality, it’s totally guileless. Poof, be gone, creeps! Yes, in the plural.

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