John Hamburg’s “bromantic” comedy is about male bonding and, though there are a couple of gays involved on its periphery, it’s strictly for heterosexual consumption.

Harmless Peter (Paul Rudd) is an LA real estate agent with an unfortunate habit of uttering the wrong catch-phrases to his clients. When the girl he is about to marry (Rashida Jones) dispatches him to find himself a best man, he runs into problems — for he has no male friends.

So he embarks on a series of “man-dates”, which prove disastrous until he meets Jason Segel’s Sydney. A cruising bachelor who likes to point out the women he’s “had”, Sydney becomes Peter’s best friend, which begins to annoy his fiancée. Having pushed her would-be husband towards his course of action, she finds the result discomfortingly unpalatable.

Produced and written as well as directed by Hamburg, I Love You, Man is fairly predictable, and offers a typically louche LA version of such events. At no point does it suggest that Peter is anything other than an innocent but not particularly charming fool; nor do we take Sydney for anything more than an obnoxious eccentric.

His chief delight is to leave his dog’s poo to be stepped in by others on the beachfront pavements.
Admittedly, there are a few better jokes than this, but the attempt to explore men’s problems with something akin to intimacy founders on the sad fact that neither character is the least bit intriguing.

Nor is anyone else in the film — though Jones’s volte-face from doting lover to conspiring wife-to-be is well enough done to suggest that Peter might be better off with Sydney than with her. JK Simmons and Jon Fevreau leaven the supporting cast with good cameos — but even they appear dire as people.

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