Kevin Smith should have pulled out

Kevin Smith is trying to play rough without a safe word, and his new movie, "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" doesn't seem to know what it wants to be. In the world of movies, Smith's is a distinct voice. He is one of a few screenwriters so recognizable that you would know that they wrote a movie even if you stumbled into the theater halfway through the screening, blindfolded.

There is Quentin Tarantino, who specializes in creating low-life criminals who are wittier and more articulate than most English majors. There is David Mamet, whose characters speak in stilted, circular theater-speak that mirrors the complexly scripted absurdity of his character's lives.

Equally distinctive is the writing of Kevin Smith, who broke on to the scene in 1994 with "Clerks", and has built a career out of his ability to make the most scatological dialogue seem like coffee-shop chit chat.

Smith writes and directs all of his films, and plays "Silent Bob" in a number of them. The MPAA must cringe whenever they are faced with the task of assigning a rating to one of his films.

"Clerks" fought to not be assigned the financially suicidal NC-17 rating. Smith's lukewarm attempt at family(ish) fare, "Jersey Girl," barely secured a PG-13 after being slapped with an R. In both cases the offending issue was constant, medical-grade dialogue regarding the MPAA's least favorite contact sport.

Now there is "Zack and Miri Make a Porno." It eventually managed to be rated R "on appeal," which means that no material was cut from the original film which was given an NC-17. Still, many theaters have refused to show it due to its excessively gutter-minded content.

Trailers on many television networks announce the title as "Zack and Miri" and the film's poster had to be pulled out of circulation and changed after being deemed too suggestive. So just how dirty of a comedy is "Zack and Miri Make a Porno?"

It starts with friendship, loveable losers and a rag-tag team assembled to accomplish a desperate task.

This is fairly formulaic comedy material, nothing to suggest the Kevin Smith whose "Clerks" still feels off-beat in an age where quirkiness is slathered on screenplays with no regard for the plausibility sacrificed. "Dogma" was just plain creative.

"Zack and Miri," however, relies too much on its outrageous subject matter and not enough on creating a unique environment. Zack (Seth Rogan) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) are childhood friends and roommates.

They are fairly poor as the film informs us via the usual methods of showing us their barely-functioning car, dead-end jobs and their mounting assortment of unpaid bills.

Before long, the power and water stop and the platonic duo are soon warming themselves by a trash-can fire in their living room and talking about how they could make porn for money.

They get a friend to front the money and spend the rest of the movie preparing for and shooting their porno along with a crew of misfits, including Kevin Smith regular Jason Mewes and real-life porn star Katie Morgan.

A film like this can only offer so much by way of humor. A fair amount of the dialogue is almost funny, but it rarely surprises. "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" plays like Smith and company thought of the name first and went from there.

A good deal of the script's "jokes" are based on crudity, profanity or both; but because the majority of the script involves both of these, it loses any dynamic quality and after a few scenes, we can no longer be shocked into blushingly laughing because there was something just as explicit a few seconds ago.

The plot is as much of a by-the-book romantic comedy as has ever been made. There is a montage of interviews when Zack and Miri cast their movie. There is a scene where everyone takes the night off and dances goofily.

There are miscommunications that make our lead characters not realize how much they love each other. As they get further into making the movie, Zack and Miri realize, of course, that they have feelings for each other.

Their process of ignoring and denying this is so drawn out and oddly sentimental that it would not be forgiven in another movie where there was not so much dirty talk and nudity to distract.

The casting gives up any chance of bringing something new by having Seth Rogan once again play Seth Rogan in the lead. Funny and talented as he is, how many times can you ask an audience to enjoy watching him go through the same range of dumpy-but-confident lovable loser emotions?

It is not that he needs to star in a biopic of John Wayne Gacy, Jr., but some sort of variation on the theme needs to happen, lest he start looking like a one-trick pony.

The sex is plentiful and squishy and sure to draw teenage boys by the truck-load to multiplexes around the world. Aside from one sweet scene of coupling (the least graphic in the film), none of the sex scenes are revelatory and at one point it is used to set up a bodily-function joke that seems like it snuck in from "Epic Movie."

Two very funny scenes, one involving an inebriated and uninvited extra, and the other with a cameo from Justin Long as a gay porn star named Brandon only serve to illuminate the fact that just talking about and showing more sex than most other movies does not equal laughs.

"Zack and Miri" is too dirty for the size of its heart and too routine for the audience it is aimed at, and performed by an all-too-familiar cast that allows little freshness to permeate through the smut.

Kevin Smith tries to have his cake and eat it too. And then he tries to smear the leftover batter all over the audience's face and expects them to laugh.