ALONG CAME POLLY REVIEW


Verdict:   In '' Along Came Polly,'' an uptight Manhattan risk assessor ( Ben Stiller) dates a meandering slob ( Jennifer Aniston ) who doesn't seem to mind that he's incompatibly neurotic. They'll learn from each other. Didn't ''Dharma and Greg'' spend five years trying to prove the same thing? Any episode of that show is preferable to John Hamburg's big-screen sitcom, which rounds up a deep bench of valuable players for almost 90 crude and witless minutes.

Hamburg co-wrote ''Meet the Parents,'' in which Stiller sweated up a storm, wreaking and sowing suburban mayhem. This is more of the same, only without the clever Jewish-Gentile culture clash. Hamburg has even furnished Stiller's character with a name almost as graceless as Gaylord Focker: Reuben Feffer.

When his wife ( Debra Messing ) runs off with their French scuba instructor (a newly muscled Hank Azaria) on their honeymoon, Reuben asks out Aniston's Polly, the dim cocktail waitress he meets at an art show. They haven't seen each other since seventh grade, but not long after their reacquaintance, he's nervously smacking her behind as they make out and considering using her blind pet ferret as Charmin. Hamburg thinks Reuben's violent allergy to ''ethnic food'' and his assault of Polly's salsa buddy (Jsu Garcia) are funny.

Aniston acquits herself OK, coming her closest yet to re-creating the effortless airiness that once belonged to Teri Garr. It helps that her Polly seems ever so stoned. Stiller, meanwhile, gets another crowd-pleasing aerobic workout. He sweats like a hog here, throwing himself into his typical put-upon, white-collar slapstick so hard he makes Jackie Chan seem lazy.

Without its insistence on truly terrible gags, '' Along Came Polly '' is a pointless but agreeable lark about two types who learn to live in stereo. But the movie is self-conscious enough to need some way to differentiate itself from whatever people are doing on ABC, so it piles on Reuben's irritable bowel syndrome, his ignorant and casually racist mother ( Michele Lee ), and his porcine best friend, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who's fast on his way to dethroning Tom Green as Hollywood's most unstoppable annoyance. Can anyone control this man? For every funny thing he pulls off in this super-size cameo (such as playing a dissatisfied Judas in a community theater production of ''Jesus Christ Superstar''), there are three or four reasons to wish he'd just go away.

Hoffman might have donated his screen time to Messing or one of the other funny actors on the sidelines of this movie: Bob Dishy, as Reuben's father, Kym Whitley, as one of Reuben's co-workers, the suddenly fearless Alec Baldwin, as Reuben's tubby, Long-Island-esque boss, or Missi Pyle, who plays Polly's crass partner in cocktailing. She and Aniston have an amusing catering shtick that suggests there might be a subtle bone in Hamburg's body after all.

Still, there is no central drama, no surprise, no tension in his comedy. The ads for '' Along Came Polly '' make it look so upbeat and simple that you're convinced it must be hiding something, like death or a disease. But the truth is there in the advertising: nothing happens



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