In Theaters

TOMCATS. 92 minutes, R, written and directed by Gregory Poirier.

The big laugh in Gregory Poirier’s “Tomcats” is supposed to come from an errant testicle that bounces through the corridors of a hospital before being mistaken for food – and joyously consumed.

As if that weren’t enough, the aforementioned testicle is loaded with cancer, literally oozing with it, a sensitive inclusion from Mr. Poirier’s sensitive script that helps to push the raunchgenre’s gross-out quotient to a whole new low – which, I suppose, is the point.

But how proud Mr. Poirier’s parents must be that their son has followed “See Spot Run” with this.

Like so many of these cookie-cutter crapfests that clutter the cineplex each week, “Tomcats” isn’t funny because it doesn’t know what funny is. In Mr. Poirier’s world, funny is a mild-mannered librarian who doubles as a whip-wielding dominatrix. Funny is a woman who does stunning things with PingPong balls – and then footballs. Funny is humiliating women for the sake of humiliating women, gross for the sake of being gross, dumb for the sake of being dumb. Funny has nothing to do with wit, but you can bet your lunch that it has everything to do with raunch which – and here’s the big surprise, folks – takes so much less effort to write.

Mirroring last year’s “Whipped,” Poirier’s film follows a group of men who hate women and fear marriage. Essentially, they’re infants masquerading as men.

They make a bet that the last man standing as a bachelor – or, in this case, a tomcat – will win a sizable chunk of change. Seven years later, that well-invested chunk has turned into a $500,000 pot – and all but two of the men, Michael (Jerry O’Connell) and Kyle (Jake Busey), have married.

Desperate to pay off a $51,000 gambling debt, Michael enlists the help of Natalie (Shannon Elizabeth) to seduce the chauvinistic Kyle into marriage. The plan is simple: After Kyle and Natalie’s wedding, Michael and Natalie will split the cash and go their separate ways – which might have worked had Michael not fallen in love with Natalie.

As benign as all this sounds, Poirier is nevertheless able to make the experience unbearably base. Maybe it’s just me, but misogyny and date rape have never been high on my list of knee-slaps – yet it’s just this sort of fare that audiences are asked to laugh at here.

Where else can Hollywood go after dipping so long and deep into the toilet bowl? Are we that far away from a film that features only 90 minutes of nonstop flatulence? Imagine the hilarity in that. Just adolescent boys filling up a room with gas and laughing themselves sick until somebody decides to end the film with a bang by taking up smoking at the 89-minute mark.

Think I’m kidding? The way things are going, don’t be surprised if that film is in theaters by the end of the year.

Grade: F

On Video and DVD

THE LEGEND OF BAGGER VANCE. 127 minutes, PG-13, directed by Robert Redford, written by Jeremy Leven, based on the novel by Steven Pressfield.

In the opening moments of Robert Redford’s “The Legend of Bagger Vance,” audiences are treated to 10 minutes of rapid-fire character development, all of which is meant to shape the film’s main character, Rannulph Junuh (Matt Damon), and explain why he lost his golf swing.

As Jack Lemmon narrates, Redford unravels a tissue of softly lit images – athletic Junuh smiling as he wins golf championship after golf championship, handsome Junuh swooning as he falls in love with Adele Invergordon (Charlize Theron), boyish Junuh shaken to the core and ultimately ruined as the result of his enlistment in World War I.

On top of all this, we get women fainting along the glimmering waters of the Atlantic, men committing suicide in the warm light of a setting sun, mass deaths on the battlefield, and then, as the film’s opening moments come to an abrupt close, the cliched soup lines of the Depression.

That most of these images take place in Savannah, Ga. – a city known for the richness of its architecture and the beauty of its landscape – punctuates the fact that Redford has moved even further away from the realism of his best film, 1994’s “Quiz Show,” and pushed deeper into the dreamlike world of the hopeless romantic.

It’s a shame, really, particularly since “Bagger Vance” is even more removed from reality than “A River Runs Through It” and “The Horse Whisperer,” two films that sent audiences straight into the fuzzy realm of allegory – and far and away from the “truths” Redford aspires to capture at every contrived turn.

In spite of its pretensions, “Bagger Vance” captures few truths; think of it as drama for dummies. It exists for one reason – to capitalize on the current popularity of golf while turning a crowd-pleasing metaphor on life. Indeed, just as surely as Junah has lost his golf swing, he’s also lost his way in life.

If this sounds familiar, it might be because Redford, in 1984, starred in Barry Levinson’s “The Natural,” which was about a baseball star who lost his swing and – guess what, folks? – his way in life.

Isn’t it fun how Hollywood repackages movies?

What isn’t so fun is how badly those movies can be realized. Shooting his film almost entirely through cheesecloth, Redford hauls in Will Smith as Bagger Vance, a black caddy – not to mention a racial stereotype – who helps Junuh get back into life by recapturing his “authentic swing.” As Bagger sees it, “Inside each and every one of us is our one true, authentic swing. Something we was born with, something that can’t be learned, something that’s got to be remembered.”

Something that’s better left forgotten.

What ensues is predictable hokum, a film that ironically doesn’t have one authentic moment in it. Redford follows “The Green Mile” in that he uses a black man as a form of deity to bring its main character, a white man, to personal enlightenment. But, unlike “The Green Mile,” he doesn’t go near the prejudices blacks endured during the time his film is set.

Instead, Redford paints his film in the rosy colors of denial, which robs his film of the depth he was obviously seeking. Worse, his film has no surprises, no soul, no performance to pluck it from the tedium. Theron looks the part, but she still can’t act, and her Southern accent is the pits; Damon is all teeth, but he has no bite; and Smith, who should be embarrassed for agreeing to grin his way through this bucket of humiliation, offers little more than complacency and a few moments of stilted wisdom.

These missteps are hardly the things of legend, but they do wonders in helping to bag “Bagger Vance.”

Grade: D

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays in Style, Thursdays in the scene, Tuesdays on “NEWS CENTER at 5” and Thursdays on “NEWS CENTER at 5:30” on WLBZ-2 and WCSH-6. He can be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.

THE VIDEO CORNER

Renting a video? NEWS film critic Christopher Smith can help. Below are his grades of recent releases in video stores.

Girlfight ? A-

102 Dalmatians ? B+

The Legend of

Bagger Vance ? D

Kestrel’s Eye ? A

Red Planet ? C+

Rugrats in Paris ? B+

Time Regained ? B+

Charlie’s Angels ?B+

The Legend of

Drunken Master ?B+

Lucky Numbers ? D-

Remember the Titans ? D

Almost Famous ? A

The Crew ? D

The 6th Day ? C+

The Tao of Steve ? B+

Meet the Parents ? B+

Wonder Boys ? A

Bedazzled ? B-

Lost Souls ? F

Nurse Betty ? C+

Beautiful ? D

Book of Shadows:

Blair Witch II ? F

The Original Kings

of Comedy ? B+

The Watcher ? F

The Adventures of Rocky

and Bullwinkle ? D

Bless the Child ? D

Bring it On ? B+

Get Carter ? D-

Woman on Top ? B+

Urban Legends:

Final Cut ? D-

Whipped ? F-

Cecil B. Demented ? C

Dinosaur ? B

Dr. T and the Women ? D

The Eyes of Tammy

Faye ? B+

Jesus’ Son ? A-

Solomon and Gaenor ? B+

What Lies Beneath ? B

Bait ? F

Battlefield Earth ? F-

Coyote Ugly ?C-

Disney’s The Kid ? B+