‘10 Days’ only feels that long

“How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” could more honestly be titled “How to Abandon Two Likable Actors and Mess Up a Perfectly Serviceable Romantic Comedy Concept by Overstaying Your Welcome Among Other Things.” That is rather on the long side, but then again, so is this film.

“How to” stars Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey, a young and attractive pair that no one wants to dislike, especially because they look so cute together and could use a career break right about now after a series of bleak film choices.

Directed by Donald Petrie, based on the book by Michele Alexander and Jeannie Long, and written by Kristen Buckley & Brian Regan and Burr Steers (far too much of a crowd for such a negligible result), “How to” starts out as a mildly diverting light romance that hints at developing into something entertaining.

Instead, the film’s lack of understanding of what it should be doing leads, as romances often do, to disappointment. A concept, no matter how promising, is not a movie, and this picture has the bad luck to illustrate the difference.

“How to” is set in a fantasy New York, where the magazine business is a growth industry, the Knicks are in the NBA Finals and no one seems to notice the too-cute symmetry of having a heroine and hero named Andie Anderson and Benjamin Barry.

Anderson (Hudson) is the “how-to girl” for fast-growing Composure magazine, writing pieces like “How to Get a Better Bod in 5 Days” and “How to Feng-Shui Your Apartment.” A serious sort who yearns (truly) to write “How to Bring Peace to Tajikistan,” Andie takes solace in the companionship of two gal pals, the near-obligatory gay best friend apparently now a thing of the past.

When one of these pals suffers a traumatic breakup, Andie’s steely editor, Lana (the always amusing Bebe Neuwirth), assigns Andie a story that’s “a dating how-not-to,” a lesson in how to drive a suitor away in a week and a half by doing all the “clingy, needy, whiny and touchy-feely things” that men are said to despise.

Just a few blocks away, an actual man, our friend Benjamin (McConaughey), is getting an assignment of his own. An advertising executive so tasty that women actually stand in line to watch him change his shirt, Ben wants to break out of his selling-beer-to-jocks ghetto and move up to a classy account like diamonds.

But Ben’s boss says that to get the account, he has to prove his understanding of women by getting one to fall in love with him in, yes, 10 days. Naturally, the plot contrives to have Andie and Ben choose each other as their guinea pigs. Hilarity, however, does not ensue.

For one thing, even though this slender concept has “90 minutes or less” written all over it, the filmmakers apparently thought they had so much splendid material in all the awful things Andie does to Ben that they were justified in a length just shy of two hours. They were wrong.

Length is a problem because the film, all those writers notwithstanding, soon runs out of inventive ways to pass the time unless you consider Andie’s endless pet names for Benjamin (Benjy, Bennie, Bennikins, Muffin, Sweet Pea, to list a few) to be wildly original.

More troubling, no one seems to have realized that there is a line between an actress acting in an irritating way to amuse an audience and an actress whose performance is genuinely irritating. Hudson is not a practiced enough farceur to keep from crossing that line again and again, and the film, blinded by her youth and attractiveness, continually miscalculates the effectiveness of that performance.

Adding the coup de grace, Andie and Benjamin spend so much screen time being the most dislikable versions of themselves that there are not enough minutes left for them to be genuine and to believably fall in love. Chemistry is a wonderful thing, but even in the movies it doesn’t ensure that the good times will last.

*

‘How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days’

MPAA rating: PG-13 for some sex-related material.

Times guidelines: Risque dialogue and situations.

Kate Hudson...Andie

Matthew McConaughey...Ben

Adam Goldberg...Tony

Michael Michele...Spears

Shalom Harlow...Green

Bebe Neuwirth...Lana

A Robert Evans/Christine Peters production and a Lynda Obst production, released by Paramount Pictures. Director Donald Petrie. Producers Lynda Obst, Robert Evans, Christine Peters. Executive producer Richard Vane. Screenplay Kristen Buckley & Brian Regan and Burr Steers, based on the book by Michele Alexander and Jeannie Long. Cinematographer John Bailey. Editor Debra Neil-Fisher. Costumes Karen Patch. Music David Newman. Production design Therese DePrez. Art director James Feng. Set decorator Nicholas Evans. Running time: 1 hour, 58 minutes. In general release.