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There's a sweetness to it that's disarming and diverting -- mostly thanks to performances of Slater, Richard Dreyfuss as his partner in crime, and Portia Di Rossi as Dreyfuss' daughter.

The whole mildly pleasant outing -- the R rating is for brief nudity and a grisly corpse -- remains aloft not on its own self-referential hot air, but on the inspired performance of Tim Allen.

If you love movies, it's hard not to like Who Is Cletis Tout? or at least smile through it.

Overall, Cletis Tout is a winning comedy that excites the imagination and tickles the funny bone.

A great idea becomes a not-great movie.

The movie attempts to mine laughs from a genre -- the gangster/crime comedy -- that wore out its welcome with audiences several years ago, and its cutesy reliance on movie-specific cliches isn't exactly endearing.

Why sit through a crummy, wannabe-hip crime comedy that refers incessantly to old movies, when you could just rent those movies instead, let alone seek out a respectable new one?

Quirky, often-fun film.