Starring: Steve Carell, Catherine Keener, Paul Rudd (I)

4 out of 10 stars

Strangely, for a movie that purports to be all about sex and how wonderful it is, The 40-Year-Old Virgin is enough to put you off copulation or any kind of sexual activity for quite a long time. Maybe not as long as its protagonist's wait, but at least for the night. In going on and on and on and on about the many different ways to get laid, it achieves the opposite of its intended effect by putting you off the notion and making you scurry away from any intimate contact whatsoever. While it's certainly gleeful in its vulgarity and almost unstinting in the lengths it will go to in getting a laugh, in the end The 40-Year-Old Virgin isn't terribly funny aside from in a let's-see-how-much-we-can-shock-you kind of way. And like another profane movie before it, Bad Santa, this movie plunges down the rabbit hole of perversity and profanity almost immediately and never looks back. When you hear the line "I once touched a guy's balls in Hebrew school" within the first ten minutes, you know you are in for a long haul. A long haul with over 100 synonyms for genitalia.

It's too bad that The 40-Year-Old Virgin isn't better, or at least more artfully constructed or executed, than it is because its leading man, Steve Carell, is extremely good and extremely funny. As Andy Stitzer, the virgin of the title, he brings a quiet grace and dignity to a role that would seem to offer anything but, and as a result he gives the only thing resembling a performance in the movie instead of the vaudeville-style grandstanding that everyone else seems to be indulging in. An introverted guy who rides a bicycle to work, collects action figures in their original packaging, and watches Survivor with his geriatric neighbors, his Andy isn't a freak or an idiot or socially retarded - he's just kind of shy and goofy and way, way inexperienced.

When his co-workers at an electronics store (Paul Rudd, Romany Malco, and Seth Rogen) get wind of his predicament, they energetically embark on a quest to relieve him of his status (of course, after publicly humiliating him). David (Rudd), who still carries a torch for a psycho ex-girlfriend after two years, advises him to be sensitive and New Age-y; Jay (Malco) gives him a tutorial in what could be politely called the Pimps and Hos School of Romance; and Cal (Rogan) tells him basically to be a dick (in one of the movie's more jarring but clever non-sequitirs, his advice to Andy is "Be David Caruso in Jade" -- it works). All approaches are wrong, wrong, wrong, but in getting into the game, Andy comes out of his shell both personally and professionally, and of his own initiative, starts a romance with single mom Trish (Catherine Keener), who's not in a hurry to get physical right away.

There's a sweet romantic comedy itching to get out of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, but director Judd Apatow (of Freaks and Geeks fame) isn't willing to let it breathe for more than five minutes at a time before stamping it down with yet another crude sequence where Andy Gets Scared Off Sex Yet Again. Humiliation is followed by humiliation, crude joke by cruder joke, and the constant barrage of freaky sex play is incredibly wearing after a while. It isn't so much the content as it is the graceless way it's hammered home again and again and the fitful and extremely erratic tone -- the movie caroms so recklessly about it makes a particularly rough seismographic output look streamlined in comparison.

Apatow, making his feature film debut, does all the requisite things you expect of a TV director first venturing into movies - the jokes are pitched too high, the performances too broad, and in exercising his non-network artistic freedom, Apatow goes too far with the material when it desperately needs a good reigning in; for instance, the now-infamous the chest waxing scene, fairly effective and funny, goes on far too long and is shot and edited so terribly you can see the actors laughing and breaking character repeatedly. The movie is definitely pitched to a studio audience mentality, where laughs are rewarded with more hijinks that become desperate and sweaty the longer they go on. Thirty minutes of it, with commercials, might be ok, but nearly two hours is way too much. In the case of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, the sitcom format would actually be welcome, as with this comedy less would definitely be more.