Director : Steven Brill Starring : Matthew Lillard, Seth Green, Dax Shepard

Not the wildly raucous free-for-all that you'd hope it would be (or would be led to believe from the trailer), Without a Paddle is part comedy, part life lessons, and part opportunity to see three toned-but-not-very-muscular actors in their underwear. All three things separately are certainly very enjoyable/life-affirming/entertaining in their own right, but combine them and you have a lukewarm adventure that sets the bar low for its comedy goals and somehow manages to underdeliver even with such paltry standards. Suffering from its PG-13 rating, which automatically kicks it down many notches from the far superior and similarly-themed Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, Paddle seems to want to attract an adult audience that enjoys juvenile, unchallenging humor, but the movie isn't willing to give you a big star to make it all go down easy. And without a big star, you're hard-pressed to find a rationalization to see this movie, because basically, it's just an Adam Sandler movie without Adam Sandler. And three sidekick-style actors, put together, do not a leading man make.

The first indication you're stepping on to the schmaltz-wagon in Without a Paddle is the gee-aww-aren't-they-cute home movies featuring four rascally young boys insignificantly bonding over treehouse shenanigans and such. Yes, they're best friends forever and always there for each other and life's an adventure when they're together. Well, it's an adventure anyway for Billy, who went off to see the world when he grew up and came back dead for all the fun he had; it's his funeral that facilitates the reunion of the remaining three cohorts. Dan (Seth Green) is the short, scrawny one who's a successful doctor but a paranoid wimp with too many phobias; Jerry (Matthew Lillard) is the corporate lackey whose passion for surfing makes him neither a good businessman nor a good boyfriend; Tom (Dax Shepard) is generically lazy and has no money and is kind of white trash. Three guys on the road to nowhere, Billy's death awakens their former youthful vigor and drive – especially when they discover Billy had mapped out the whereabouts of D.B. Cooper's infamously lost fortune. Male bonding, promises to Billy, and tinkly music follow, and soon enough the three are canoe-bound in the Pacific Northwest (actually, New Zealand, if you can believe it) for the missing money and a reaffirmation of their lifelong friendship. Yawn.

So right about now you'd expect the movie to kick into high gear, but the wild water madness never really gets too wild, even though there's a bear, a couple redneck pot farmers, a surly sheriff, some nubile (and hairy) hippie girls, and a couple chases that ultimately lead to a mountain man (Burt Reynolds) who might know something about D.B. Cooper. There's a surprising lack of chemistry between the three leads, and even though separately they're all capable of being funny, they never really find a rhythm here. Green is by far the most successful, but it's a standard uptight-Billy Crystal role that's marked with a straitjacket from his first moments onscreen. Lillard is supposed to be kind of goofy and kind of freewheeling, but his guilty pangs over his girlfriend make him a total downer – and really, who wants to see Lillard, who can be hilariously (and sometimes disturbingly) manic, become Mr. Stability? And Shepard is pretty much just a blank from the get-go. Granted, the let's-huddle-naked-in-the-rain-to-keep-warm scene is somewhat funny despite its gay-panic subtext (see Harold and Kumar for a better take on that), but it's too little too late, and the climax limps along despite the presence of a grenade, automatic weaponry, and the bones of the deceased Mr. Cooper himself. Somewhere along the line, you'll get the feeling you had died along with him – of boredom