HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS & ALIENATE PEOPLE

Directed by Robert B Weide. Starring Simon Pegg, Kirsten Dunst, Jeff Bridges, Gillian Anderson, Danny Huston, Megan Fox, Max Minghella 15A cert, gen release, 109 min

RARELY HAS a comedy been populated by so many dislikeable characters as in this feebly humourless effort, and the few vaguely sympathetic folk who get a word in are just plain boring. That's hardly surprising for a movie following the experiences of Toby Young, an English journalist noted for his irritating, obnoxious behaviour, as unashamedly acknowledged in his book on which the film is based.

Young cultivated a reputation for provocation in the early 1990s, when he and Julie Burchill founded the lively but short-lived popular culture journal The Modern Review, which revelled in expressing unpopular opinions. The journal caught the attention of Vanity Faireditor Graydon Carter, who invited Young to work at the magazine's New York headquarters.

What followed was, in Young's words, a "spectacular fall from grace", as chronicled in his book and in the movie, which is fictionalised to the point of changing all the names. Young becomes Sidney Young, over- eagerly played by Simon Pegg. Vanity Fairis renamed Sharps, and Graydon Carter is Clayton Harding, played by Jeff Bridges with a mane of grey hair.

In the first of many credibility- stretching scenes, we are asked to believe that a journalist of Young's age (35 then) and apparent sophistication would gaze agog at all the neon signage on arriving in Manhattan. Sidney's gauche sense of irony doesn't travel across the Atlantic, as he discovers on his first day at Sharpswhen he turns up in a red T-shirt emblazoned "Young, dumb and full of come", a Modern Reviewheadline for an issue with Keanu Reeves on the cover.

By a highly unlikely coincidence, the young woman (Kirsten Dunst) Sidney was chatting up the night before in a bar just happens to be a Sharpsjournalist. She's involved in a secret affair with a smugly egotistical senior editor (Danny Huston, laying on the smarm), but that strand is left as underdeveloped as Sidney's relationship with his philosopher father who arrives late in the film, just in time for Sidney to wisecrack, "You thought Brad Pitt was a cave in Yorkshire."

That limp line is symptomatic of what passes for humour in an archly obvious satire that is surprisingly soft on the air-kissing, airbrushing relationship between the publicity machine (personified by a glacially manipulative Gillian Anderson) and celebrity- driven magazines.

In outline, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, marking an entirely inauspicious feature debut for Curb Your Enthusiasmdirector Robert Weide, may suggest a hybrid of The Apartmentand The Devil Wears Prada. But it sorely lacks the sharp tongue and teeth of either antecedent.