If I Were You

If I Were You is a screwball comedy for Canadians—not LOL funny, but as crazy as you might expect Toronto to get.

If I Were You has more than its share of laughs, but director Joan Carr-Wiggin needed to cut half an hour to make this fly without interest flagging. She had the exact same problem with her last movie, “A Previous Engagement.’’

It’s a complex geometry that’s mined for some interesting perspectives on romantic fulfillment, but the film’s comic sense (exemplified by a drunken Harden acting inappropriately) is slack and its dramatic conclusion unfulfilling.

A modern cinematic equivalent of the sort of tired sex farces that used to populate Broadway with regularity, If I Were You simultaneously exploits and squanders the talents of its star, Marcia Gay Harden.

Mostly it just redefines the word “asinine.” Marcia Gay Harden never makes a wrong move, but this movie is so futile, one goes away convinced that the moves she makes are hardly worth making.

A comedy that is so scatterbrained and long-winded that much of it feels invented on the spot. (It’s also a half-hour too long.)

Hardworking Oscar winner Harden and beguiling Spanish star Watling do nothing for this haphazard film, which belatedly decides it wants to be a stage satire as the women lark into a ridiculous avant-garde production of “MacBeth.” Bloody awful.