An Excruciating Misfire

It's time for Hollywood to discover another orifice. The anal fixations of recent juvenilia on the order of Shrek, Say It Isn't So, and See Spot Run -- part of a pattern of lowbrow, below-the-belt, flatulence-happy comedies for kids and teens that also includes, from recent years, Stuart Little, Head Over Heels, and both of Eddie Murphy's Nutty Professor films -- was criminally tedious even before Evolution. Now, Evolution has pushed proctological-scatological jokes to a new extreme with such extended scenes as an emergency probe of Orlando Jones's colon and a sloppy, 500-gallon enema applied to an enormous alien through its car-size sphincter.

The sad fact is that filmmaker Ivan Reitman is to blame for this. Yes, that's the Ivan Reitman of Twins, Kindergarten Cop, Dave, Junior, Six Days Seven Nights and the HBO movie The Late Shift (the latter produced by him, as was Road Trip, but Iım choosing to ignore that detail). These were all funny, reasonably grownup films that suggested the one-time maestro of Meatballs and Stripes had paid his party dues and could be trusted with our hearts and minds.

Yet Evolution, a CGI-infested comedy about extraterrestrial microbes that rapidly develop into complex animal and vegetable forms, is a brazenly desperate effort by the director to recreate the comic anarchy of his Bill Murray years. Specifically, Reitman is trying to remake Ghostbusters for a contemporary youth audience raised on potty jokes by everyone from the Farrelly brothers to DreamWorks. If that's not thankless enough, Reitman's trying to do it without Bill Murray.

An excruciating misfire, Evolution stars Jones and David Duchovny as community college professors of geology who discover microscopic, un-Earthly life forms on a meteorite. Taking note of the incredible swiftness with which the single-cell organisms divide and adapt into increasingly sophisticated species, the scientists attempt a study but find themselves trumped by the U.S. military, which has its own agenda for the aliens. (For this, Duchovny walked away from the same storyline and a healthy paycheck every week on "The X-Files"?)

While a smarmy army general (Ted Levine, more or less in the William Atherton role from Ghostbusters) and a single-minded state governor (Dan Aykroyd) mishandle the crisis, our heroes become the nucleus of a giddy, monster-busting unit of mavericks. Sound familiar?

Julianne Moore is utterly wasted as an accident-prone doctor from the Center for Disease Control and inevitable love interest for Duchovny. (Gee . . . Duchovny paired with a spirited, pretty redhead playing a M.D. What a concept.) Moore, like her co-stars, is clearly wearing the most professional face she can in a film whose comic bearings are constantly (I mean constantly) shifting from f/x extravaganza to play-it-straight suspense to screw-the-storyline irony.

Duchovny, especially, is at sea with his unfocused, and frankly impossible, assignment, which is to wisecrack his way through the second half just as Murray did through the whole of Ghostbusters. (For the record, Duchovny was a very funny host on Saturday Night Live a couple of years ago, but he's no Murray when it comes to bursting sanctimonious balloons or undercutting authority.)

Numerous scenes are so poorly conceived and executed (a terrible if ambitious set-piece about hunting down a dragon in a shopping mall is particularly painful) that Reitman can't find enough story coherence and credibility to make the point that abandoning coherence and credibility can be great, cheeky fun. On the other hand, maybe I'm missing the joke: This is a regressive comedy about rampant evolution. Ha-ha? Eh.