Heartbreak Hospital

A game and often quite funny attempt with an expert cast.

Gerber has a sharp cast at hand -- All work furiously, yet the director, with his fake backdrops and stately pacing, never settles on a consistent tone. Surely the novel had more bite.

Nicely shot around New York City, this dodgy mixture of cutesy romance, dark satire and murder mystery uses the same central conceit as Neil LaBute's "Nurse Betty."

Tries to combine romantic comedy, soap-opera parody and murder mystery, but the disparate elements never gel, and the film, about homicide at a daytime television serial, bounces around with no clue of how to reconcile or intertwine its genre conventions.

Everyone tries very hard to make the story sweet and funny, but the soggy screenplay defeats them every time.

Sluggish, tonally uneven -- In fact, it doesn't even rise to the level of 1991's Soapdish, with the feverishly mugging Elisabeth Shue sending up TV's cesspool of sentimentality.

An excruciating demonstration of the unsalvageability of a movie saddled with an amateurish screenplay.