WhatzUp

40 Days and 40 Nights
by Derek Neff

The premise — at least on paper — has potential: 20-something web designer Matt Sullivan (Josh Hartnett), recovering from a series of meaningless one-night-stands after breaking up with a long-time girlfriend, decides to give up all forms of sex for Lent. No kissing, no fondling, not even any self-gratification. Nothing. Nobody thinks that Matt can or even should do it, not even his brother (Tom Trese) who is training to be a Catholic priest. But Matt decides it would be good for him and would help cleanse him of some pretty unhealthy habits. As luck would have it, as soon as he makes this vow he meets Erica, the woman of his dreams (Shannyn Sossamon).

I have so many fundamental problems with 40 Days and 40 Nights that my only struggle is in how to prioritize them. Maybe I could start with the fact that you never really get the sense that Matt enjoys or even craves sex that much to begin with. True, before he makes his vow he seems to score pretty much every night. (In the Logan’s Run world of this movie no one is older than 25, no one has much body fat and all a man has to do to get lucky is make accidental eye contact with a pretty woman.) But Matt doesn’t seem particularly sexual or naughty or unbridled to begin with. He may as well be giving up dental surgery for Lent for all the pleasure he seems to derive from it. Hartnett is all wrong for the role. He plays Matt as bland straight-man to the comical ebbs and flows of his own biological impulses, nothing more. What 40 Days really needed was a leading man with a nasty edge, playing a predatory seducer. 40 Days would have been much more narratively satisfying, not to mention more funny, if this were about comeuppance, even a self-imposed one.

40 Days has the same cute, pseudo-frank dialogue that’s put in the mouths of all characters appearing in movies about 20-somethings in the city these days, with the same droll delivery. (Writer Robert Perez and director Michael Lehmann seem to think that the number one rule of comedy is that repeated use of the word “dude” is a self-renewing wellspring of hilarity.) And the treatment of female “characters” in the movie — from Matt’s invariably attractive co-workers who exist only to demean themselves by casually trying to seduce Matt and thus win the office pool, to Matt’s ex-girlfriend Nicole (Vinessa Shaw), who could be called evil if she weren’t so one-dimensionally dull, to Matt’s new love, Erica, about whom we learn next to nothing — is pathetic.

And if you’re going to be bringing up issues of religion, spirituality, sexuality and all the confused combinations therewith, maybe you could be more honest about all of these subjects and even aspire at least some off-hand meaningfulness. But no, it’s all a cheap set-up, nothing more than a vehicle for a series of increasingly lame jokes that fizzle on impact