April can also be a cruel month at the movies. Last year’s Oscar contenders are disappearing from the theaters. Summer’s blockbusters are waiting on deck. And though the summer season starts earlier and earlier, it hasn’t backed up into April yet.

This year Summer starts next week with the release of Spiderman. This year summer is off to a wow start. Spiderman has it all — appealing stars, great effects, a very human approach and a story with a very moral, ethical message.

But it isn’t May yet. We’re suffering through the cruel last weeks of April when audiences are turning out enthusiastically, but what they are finding at the multiplex are films that need the relative quiet of the April marketplace to prosper.

Changing Lanes is just the kind of movie that can prosper in April: a good looking affair that spends a lot of time blathering about ethics and morality, but is so flimsy underneath the flashy surface that as the twists and turns tease out the whole affair feels exhausted.

Changing Lanes is completely implausible and frustrating if you know anything about the court system anywhere or the geography and habits of New York City law firms and their hierarchies. I’ve seen several very charitable reviews of Changing Lanes, and I can only conclude that the writers of these gentle reviews know little about either.

The list of things that are inaccurate and faked and fudged to bring a sense of urgency to Changing Lanes is extensive. I won’t fill the page with all of them, though I could, but as a sampling: partners in Manhattan law firms don’t drive themselves in their own cars from the office to the court; even easily manipulated sons-in-law don’t make partner somewhere south of 29; and no one can get to where our young conflicted law boy gets being such a naïve dummy about how the world he or she is entering truly works. All of these are just technicalities. The actual court scenes are even worse.

One factor that probably accounts for the warm fuzzy handling Changing Lanes has generally received is its stars. Ben Affleck is Gavin Benek, the smug, self-loving doofus who is on his way to court with the all important papers that will give his firm control over a charitable foundation worth $100 million.

I almost laughed out loud when this figure was mentioned. I could hear the script conference: “How much should this struggle be worth?” “How about $100 million? That’s a nice round number, and it is a lot of money!” I certainly expect more from a screenplay written in part by Michael Tolkin, author of The Player, The New Age, and The Rapture.

Affleck is recently out of rehab, and no one wants to slam a guy just out of rehab. His role is slightly more demanding than the other self-loving, swaggering hot dogs he’s played so convincingly in the past. But for me, he’s not an appealing actor and he’s in a very unappealing role. He barely seems convinced he’s a good guy at the beginning, and then he turns into a bullying coward at the first sign of trouble. After that, his changes in heart and attitude don’t seem motivated by anything other than the need for more plot twists.

Playing against Affleck is Samuel L. Jackson as Doyle Gipson. Doyle is everything Gavin is not. He’s black, divorced, a father, a recovering alcoholic, decidedly not affluent and struggling hard with all of the above. Jackson has drained almost all of his Shaft coolness out of this performance. When he gets angry, it peeps out a bit, like when he smacks around, first verbally then physically, a couple of yuppie advertising flacks.

When these two collide on the FDR (Franklin D. Roosevelt highway) cruising down the East Side of Manhattan, both on their way to court, Gavin’s glib offer of a blank check to get out of the situation, irritates Doyle. Gavin drops the very important papers he is carrying, and Doyle recovers them.

Both men are late for court. Doyle misses his hearing and so his wife is granted sole custody of his boys, which means she and they will be moving to Portland, Oregon. Gavin is given until the end of the day to retrieve and produce the lost documents to keep control of the trust.

Since neither understands how serious the stakes are for the other, they keep misreading how to respond to the situation with ever more dire circumstances heaped upon them. Gavin lost my sympathy early on by paying a guy to destroy Doyle’s credit record and bank accounts. Even when Doyle tampers with Gavin’s car, I couldn’t feel much sympathy for Gavin.

Lots of good actors fill out the supporting roles in Changing Lanes. Academy Award-winner William Hurt is Doyle’s AA sponsor. Amanda Peet is Gavin’s very calculating wife. She would make a better lawyer than he ever will. She’s much tougher. Sydney Pollack is Gavin’s partner/ father-in-law. Toni Collette is Gavin’s ex-fling and co-worker. She doesn’t seem like much of an alternative to his wife. She’s the one who finds him the cyber thug to destroy Doyle.

Changing Lanes looks great, with a charging sometimes hand-held style that is supposed to suggest how “immediate” all this is, but it all still feels contrived and flat. I never doubted that both men would come out sadder but wiser.

There is great art on the walls — Alex Katz, Rothko, Chagall, Dufy, and more. At least the supposed high rollers spend some of their money well.

Catherine Lee is the executive director of Fort Wayne Cinema Center, the only independently operated movie theater in Fort Wayne, specializing in independent, foreign, documentary, specialty and classic films.

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