Starring Jennifer Garner, Timothy Olyphant, Kevin Smith, and Juliette Lewis. Rated PG.

Catch & Release must have sounded like such a good date movie on paper. The big-screen directorial debut of Susannah Grant—who penned the script for Erin Brockovich—features lines specifically designed for your favourite beer belcher; at the same time, thanks to the high cheekbones and melancholy musings of doe-eyed star Jennifer Garner, the movie is careful to maintain the achingly precious tone of a gloomy chic flick.

As the locally shot movie opens, Gray Wheeler (Garner), a fragile office drone who veers through disaster saddled with a name the colour of prison walls, is brooding over the sudden death of her fiancé. Much to her surprise, she’s attracted to the bad-boy hunk who just happens to be the dead guy’s best friend (Deadwood’s Timothy Olyphant, painfully miscast as the kind of unshaven Peter Pan women in these kinds of movies are never able to resist). He doesn’t get to be named after a depressing colour; he’s called Fritz. And, unlike any Fritz I’ve ever known, he talks in a manly rasp and squints a lot. In fact, he seems to be getting through life by doing a passable imitation of Clint Eastwood in The Bridges of Madison County.

Compared to Gray’s other male friends (including a portly man-child played for patchy comic relief by director Kevin Smith), Fritz must seem dangerously sexy. But then, despite the worshipful opinions of various admirers, Gray isn’t the brightest bride ever left at the altar. It doesn’t help that the normally charming Garner seems intimidated by the heavy nature of her role. Whenever she attempts to conjure an expression of even the slightest complexity, it’s like watching a kid try to do long division in her head.

Grant does her best to keep things interesting. It seems that the dead fiancé had a secret: he was having an affair with a tacky massage therapist (Juliette Lewis) who claims he’s the father of her four-year-old kid (Vancouver’s Joshua Friesen, who turns out to be the most unaffected actor of the bunch). But the lack of chemistry is so obvious here that nothing works. After a while the manipulative nature of Grant’s script starts to grate. There’s a moment when Gray is lying in bed with a besotted Fritz. She actually asks him what his favourite colour is. If you think he answers magenta, you haven’t been paying attention.