Starring Zach Braff, Jacinda Barrett, Blythe Danner, and Rachel Bilson. Rated 14A.

It's easy to see why director Tony Goldwyn (of the famous MGM family) and screenwriter Paul Haggis (Mr. Crash) were attracted to the material in The Last Kiss. When the Italian film of the same name, written and directed by Gabriele Muccino, came out five years ago, the tale of four guys pushing 30 and freaked out by responsibility exhibited a highly polished Eurosheen that seemed ripe for Americanization””to the extent that something already informed by Hollywood sentiment could be further brought home. In any case, what better way to do that than to shoot it again, in Quebec, and call that Wisconsin?

There's nothing grossly dumb about the new version, but the filmmakers appear to have been most attracted to the surface elements in the original, dropping the darker, more textural hints at a stifling world these aging boys were anxious to leave behind. If anything, they have amplified Kiss's most irritating quality, a kind of “grandiose miserabilism”, as the Village Voice complained of Muccino's creation.

Indeed, everything amounts to a hill of beans in this world of rich white people who have too many choices and are really, really bummed about it. The main decider is Michael (Zach Braff, doing his Jewish Ray Romano shtick), an architect who is glad that his girlfriend, Jenna (Jacinda Barrett), is having a baby but not quite excited enough to marry her. He is all too easily distracted by a fetching college girl (Rachel Bilson) he meets at a friend's wedding.

His other pals, meanwhile, include a recent dad driven nuts by his wife (Vancouverite Lauren Lee Smith) since they had a baby; a surfer-dude bartender (Eric Christian Olsen) content to nail any hottie in sight; and a volatile little guy (Michael Weston, memorable as a vicious psychopath on Six Feet Under) who recently lost a girlfriend and now wants to go travelling.

Pretty earth-shattering stuff, eh? Infidelity, postpartum depression, Peter Pan syndrome, and wanderlust.

Exuding slightly more gravity is a subplot involving Jenna's parents. Here, Blythe Danner is superb as a woman fed up with the cool rationality of her therapist husband (Tom Wilkinson), although we only have her character's word for it, as hubby comes across as genuinely understanding. The effect is that Danner's fine acting feels misplaced””as if she had been watching better Italian movies (say, starring Stefania Sandrelli as a bored housewife) and wanted to try that, too. Well, it was her choice.