Starring Eugene Levy and Samuel L. Jackson. Rated 14A.

A curious mixture of assembly-line rubbish and genuine comic nuance, The Man is just about saved by Eugene Levy, despite the film's many glaringly obvious deficiencies.

Set in a Detroit that looks just like an undisguised Toronto, the film offers Levy as Andy Fidler, a Wisconsin dental-tool salesman set to deliver the keynote address at a Michigan convention when he's inadvertently pulled into a drug-smuggling sting run by U.S. special agent Derrick Vann, played by Samuel L. Jackson at his most monotonous. A loner whose rogue ways have cost him his family (back-story alert!) and the trust of his ATF superiors (Miguel Ferrer alert!), Vann hijacks the hapless Midwesterner who-in one of the strangest product placements of recent years-just happened to be reading USA Today at the wrong time and place.

Next thing he knows, the bespectacled milquetoast is seeking weapons from a bad Brit (Blade II's Luke Goss) known for knocking off the "loose ends" of his cash-and-carry business. This occasions a great deal of fish-out-of-Wisconsin humour, much of it quite amusing, thanks to Levy's just-right take on his character's combination of skittishness and sense of rectitude-or rectaltude, since the movie hobbles him with pointless fart jokes that interfere with Andy's essential dignity.

As he did in the American Pie flicks, the SCTV veteran manages to project a common decency that makes middle-aged nerdiness strangely heroic. When Andy starts giving life lessons to the stoic, foul-mouthed Vann-they both have daughters who are budding ballerinas, for crying out loud-you know that the overreach machine was rented for a few too many hours. (Despite constant assertions about Fidler's white-bread credentials, the movie seems to be saying something vague about the black-Jewish connection in America, but maybe that's just my overreach.)

The Man is adequately directed by Les Mayfield, maker of such modern classics as Flubber and Encino Man, from a script mostly by former SNL writer Margaret Oberman and actor Jim Piddock. The latter played supercilious Englishmen in Best in Show and A Mighty Wind, both of which gave Levy far more to do in a much smarter context. With this comic Canadian, however, it turns out that even a little is a lot.