Picture that guy. You know, that harmless but awkward guy who lacked social skills and went to your high school or lived in your building freshman year. Occasionally, he would try to crack a joke in front of a group of people, only to have it go over everyone's heads. When he was met with nothing but icy silence, you couldn't help but cringe. You felt embarrassed for him, and it wasn't a nice feeling.

I got that same feeling, more than once, while watching John Hamburg's Along Came Polly. In the film, Ben Stiller's Reuben Feffer suffers more than his fair share of indignities. On the first day of his honeymoon, his new bride (Debra Messing) ditches him for their scuba diving instructor. A couple weeks later, on a first date, he gets a case of the runs and overflows his date's toilet.

If you haven't seen the film, I know what you're thinking: What's wrong with that?

This is, after all, a movie starring Ben Stiller, the guy who got his testicles caught in his zipper in one of There's Something About Mary's funniest scenes. But that's where the problem lies -- we've seen it all before, funnier and just plain done better. That scene in There's Something About Mary was so outrageous, you couldn't help but laugh. By comparison, Stiller's embarrassing gags in Polly seem half-hearted and uninspired, not to mention cringe-worthy.

And that's a shame, because Along Came Polly could have been a good little movie. Co-starring Jennifer Aniston, the film follows the relationship of Stiller's ultra-neurotic Reuben and Aniston's Polly, a quirky, free-spirited cocktail waitress who meets Reuben at an art gallery.

While it's your basic, cliched, "opposites attract" romantic comedy (and a blatant rip-off of Woody Allen's far superior Annie Hall), Aniston and Stiller actually have some chemistry. Stiller's got his "loser" leading man shtick down to an art, and Aniston proves that she's more than a television actress, radiating not only beauty but an admirable level of comedic talent.

The film also features an amusing performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays Sandy Lyle, a former child star and friend of Reuben's. While Hoffman's character is sometimes too over the top, the actor manages to generate laughs in several scenes.

Even the admirable work of its actors, however, can't save this film. It awkwardly shifts back and forth between bathroom gags and intelligent humor. As a result, Polly fails to establish its own identity, becoming little more than a weak cross-blending of Woody Allen and the Farrelly Brothers -- two ingredients that just don't mix.