Along Came Polly
Rating: One and a half star
Starring: Ben Stiller, Jennifer Aniston, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Debra Messing. Written and directed by John Hamburg. Rated PG-13 for sexual content, language, crude humor and some drug references.

By AUSTIN O’CONNOR
Lowell Sun Staff
Thank goodness for Philip Seymour Hoffman.
No, the roly-poly character actor doesn’t quite manage to single-handedly make Along Came Polly into a good movie. But as the middling romantic comedy’s slovenly sidekick to Ben Stiller’s lovelorn risk assessor Reuben, Hoffman at least makes the darn thing watchable. And that’s saying something. Believe me, that’s saying something.
Hoffman plays Reuben’s buddy Sandy Lyle, a former child star so starved to regain his fame that he hires his own camera crew to follow him around under the delusion that the E! Channel might someday be interested in the footage. His character also shares a name with a former British Open golf champion, though for my money, if the filmmakers were bent on naming their comic-relief sidekick after a formerly fine golfer whose playing career has now fallen on hard times, Ian Baker-Finch would have been a funnier choice. But maybe that’s just me.
So Sandy is Reuben’s pal since childhood, and as the movie starts Reuben really needs a pal, since his wife (Debra Messing) has just decided to bed down with a French nudist scuba instructor (Hank Azaria) on the first day of their honeymoon. Back home in Manhattan and newly single, the neurotic Reuben runs into Rachel from Friends, who in this movie is called Polly Prince.
Polly is played by Jennifer Aniston, and the character seems so similar to the actress’s alter ego on the long-running TV show, there always seems to be a decent chance that Ross or Phoebe will stop by, or that Reuben and Polly will end up getting a post-date cup of coffee at Central Perk.
For his part, Stiller isn’t exactly stretching here, either. He’s a very funny actor, but he’s done the fidgety, hapless rom-com lead thing so many times now, there always seems to be a decent chance that he’ll suddenly suffer a ghastly mishap involving his zipper, or that Robert DeNiro will pop into the frame to ask if he’s a pothead, Focker.
Along Came Polly was written and directed by John Hamburg, who is credited as the co-writer of Meet the Parents, which only means that whoever his co-writer was on that much funnier movie should now probably feel doubly proud. This movie is hardly even a movie — it’s more like a string of mildly amusing scenes tethered precariously together by a wisp of a recycled plot. Blow at the screen and the characters might be whisked out of the theater.
There’s hardly anything memorable going on here, aside perhaps from Azaria saying the line “There is a fire in my trousers” with his ridiculous French accent and a funny scene in which Alec Baldwin, as Reuben’s obnoxious insurance company boss, explosively violates nearly every unwritten rule of urinal etiquette during a bathroom confrontation with his underling.
And then there’s Hoffman, who looks just awful and barrels through the whole movie with the bottled frenzy of a full keg rolling downhill. In his first scene, he arrives at Reuben’s doomed wedding stuffed, like a sausage, into an ill-fitting tuxedo, then falls violently to the ground as soon as his shoes hit the well-buffed dance floor. But he pops back up. Thank goodness, he pops right back up.
Austin O’Connor’s e-mail address is aoconnor@lowellsun.com.