Lanie Kerigan (Jolie) is a fluff piece local television journalist with Marilyn Monroe's hairdo and the thousand-yard stare of the truly uninteresting. Paired for some hazy reason with ex-one night stand cameraman Pete (Burns), Lanie interviews hobo Prophet Jack (Tony Shalhoub: in an entirely different film) to find that the street corner seer "sees" Lanie's death "next Thursday." Convinced by Prophet Jack's surprisingly good batting average, shallow Lanie learns to gather her rosebuds while she might.

Life or Something Like It is another of those Regarding Henry/My Life, "once an asshole, now a disingenuous liberal sprite because I'm dying" movies that forgets to establish its characters as archetypes, content to pose them like Ken and Barbie dolls in simulacrums of formulaic existence. It marks its point of greatest desperation with not one group sing-along but two, compounding its sins by mangling Peter Gabriel's haunting Anne Sexton elegy "Mercy Street" in a confused attempt to shift its tone mid-stream. It's not that Life or Something Like It is offensive or repulsive, but that the picture is unremittingly stultifying. With nothing to say and no characters with whom to say it, the film is a lugubrious trudge through the bowels of "unchallenging pabulum."

Never funny, never clever, never smart, Life or Something Like It's most philosophically sticky puzzle is the extent to which its title can be read straight or with irony. (On the one level, it suggests an awareness of itself as a fiction and on a more caustic level it conveys a resigned admission that it sucks.) The film is enjoyable for the dozen or so who have never seen a movie before in their lives and for men and women hard-up enough to get turned on by Angelina Jolie's always-clad breasts and Edward Burns.-Walter Chaw

© Film Freak Central; filmfreakcentral.net. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.