Imagine the dumbest half-hour sitcom you've ever seen, spin it out to 90 minutes by making it even more thin and shallow, and you have "Love, Guaranteed." This movie is so appalling it doesn't even deserve comparison with sitcoms. It plays like an unendurable TV commercial about beautiful people with great lifestyles and not a thought in their empty little heads. It is an embarrassing comedy, a painful romance, and a truly insufferable romance comedy.

Only rarely is a film so proudly formulaic, both in plot and character. The story hinges on Susan (Rachel Leigh Cook), a "civil litigator" and the head of a struggling law firm in Seattle. Her associates are Roberto (Sean Amsing), a gay man who's a screamingly limp-wristed stereotype, and Pam (Lisa Durupt), who's so perky you fear she might break into little pieces. Susan is often pro bono, causing her boutique firm’s bills to pile up. When she's off work, she spends her time at home drinking a glass of lonely white wine and staring vacantly out the window.

One morning, Susan's luck shifts when she agrees to take a case with her latest client Nick (Damon Wayans Jr). Nick has come to her office because he wants to file a lawsuit against an online dating company called Love, Guaranteed. He says he's gone on 986 dates without having found love, and wants to sue for fraud. Susan is dismissive of the case at first since it seems Nick has found a classic legal loophole and is just out for the money. But of course, he's really trying to prove a point about the dispassionate way these apps package and sell human connection to people who are emotionally vulnerable. And he plans to donate any proceeds from his suit to a children's wing for the rehab center where he works with the elderly.

If you find this whole set-up ridiculous, and think that Susan and Nick will eventually realize that they are really in love with each other, you are no more than ordinarily prescient. The journey to get there, though, is remarkably tedious. Most of the comedy here comes from Susan's research into online dating, which leads her to profound realizations such as the guys who don't show up and the guys who look nothing like their photos. "Love, Guaranteed" feels a couple of years too late when it comes to finger-wagging at online dating, and a couple of decades removed from the need for a charismatic, handsome man to show a workaholic woman how to have fun.

It's crashingly obvious to everyone in the audience, but not to anyone in the movie. When we're that much smarter than the characters, you have to wonder why they aren't buying tickets to watch us. So lacking in human characteristics are these people that when the screenplay falls back on the last resort of bankrupt filmmaking imagination - a childbirth scene - it appears right after a moment that is supposed to make us feel empathy for Nick and his love life. It's almost as if they realized that genuine human insight was slowly getting into the story, so they had to interrupt it with something obligatory.

The movie provides an opportunity to spend 90 minutes in the presence of the most cloying, inane and annoying dialogue I've heard in many a moon. The courtroom dialect is possibly the worst, with Cook being given lines like "She’s going to be lawyered up. Our case has to be airtight." It is not merely badly directed, it is written by Hilary Galanoy and Elizabeth Hackett as if they were preparing texts for a workshop of unsuccessful professionals in the human awareness industry.

The founder of Love, Guaranteed is a pretentious lifestyle guru named Tamara Taylor (Heather Graham), who is mostly an outsized comedic cameo. Even worse are Graham's nonvocal mannerisms, in which she gasps for breath and rolls her eyes in inarticulate sincerity as words fail her. Why would so many good actors sign up for a script this dopey? My guess is that they look upon these things as the equivalent of parties where they can make an appearance, have some fun without doing much in the way of heavy lifting, and get paid a lot of money in the process.

Trust me, they would have been better served if director Mark Steven Johnson had just forgone the film entirely and filmed the cast party. None of the actors are able to find a way to rise above the material, instead just plowing through in the broadest manner possible while trying not to look too obviously embarrassed. "Love, Guaranteed" fails at fundamentals we take for granted when we go to the movies. By lacking them, it illustrates what the minimum requirements are for a competent film. Yes, you can clearly see and hear them, especially when they're missing.