“40 Days” relies on crude humor

The joke is yanked, inflated, stretched and strung out over the film’s 93 minutes. Gags involving condoms, erections, Viagra and fruit that looks like vaginas are stuffed into those minutes. “40 Days and 40 Nights” is flip and exhaustingly hip and irreverent to the point of being sacrilegious.

And it’s funny enough, in fits and starts. Just don’t expect “sophisticated.” Josh Hartnett, a beady-eyed twin to sensitive hunk Chris Klein, stars as Matt. He’s a San Francisco Web page designer who can’t quite get over the girl who dumped him, the vivacious and cruel redhead, Nicole (Vinessa Shaw). Matt is filling his evenings with one-night stands. But the empty sex is freaking him out, making him hallucinate that he's falling into a chasm. His only consolation is telling his priest-in-training brother (Adam Trese) all his troubles. That fake-confession is where the boy has a brainstorm.

He’ll give up sex for Lent. “No kissing, no touching, no fondling ...” No girls, no masturbation. Being a straight guy in San Francisco, working with and living among legions of sexily clad, sexily available sexy females, that’s going to be quite a chore for our young hunk.

Matt's smart-aleck roommate (Paulo Costanzo), whose gift to humor is knowing more euphemisms for sex, sex organs and sexuality than anybody, helps set up a Web page and takes bets on whether our lad will make it through his 40 nights without. So of course, Matt meets Ms. Perfect, Erica (Shannyn Sossamon), who sorely tests his resolve, even as she contributes to a most romantic buildup in sexual tension. Michael Lehman, who has had a wildly uneven career since 1989’s "Heathers," finds the obvious laughs in Rob Perez’s script. However, he isn’t as good at finding the heart. He reveals “the vow” to Erica too early to capitalize on the humor in having her fall for a guy who seems more sensitive and respectful than he really is.

The film doesn't give Matt anything like a learning curve. The guy says he’s figured this and that out about himself as he dreams of droves of women and seas of breasts. And even though it’s pitched as a movie about the unexpected joys of “abstention,” “40 Days” isn’t.

It has a coarseness that poisons its few attempts at tenderness and romance. Will Matt make it for 40 days, or will he “make it?” How many times can Erica bite her lip, adorably, before she injures herself?

If you want to know the answers to these questions, and gaze upon more adorable 20somethings than you can stand, in various stages of dress and undress (yes, there are full-fledged sex scenes), then this is the movie for you. But I’d suggest you give up horny 20somethings, or at least movies about them, for Lent. Surely by Easter another oversexed youth picture will come our way, one that aims just as low, titillates just as much and doesn’t wear the pretense of being about something deeper.

— KRT Campus

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