"I'm the uptight lawyer," one minor character baldly declares before the opening credits of A Guy Thing conclude. Sure enough, he's exactly that and nothing more. Like every aspect of this romantic comedy, he performs his formula-dictated part as if any deviation would result in some sort of catastrophe. At least a catastrophe would have been less dull. Instead, the film ticks through one plot point after another with atomic-clock precision. Though slated to marry Selma Blair, Jason Lee wakes up the morning after his bachelor party in bed with Julia Stiles. Do hijinks ensue? Rest assured, they do. As one farcical attempt after another fails to cover up Lee's infidelity, and a psycho ex-boyfriend enters the picture, Lee becomes aware of a growing attraction to the free-spirited Stiles. In other words, it's Romantic Comedy Type A, Variation 21-B. If this were 1967, Stiles' character would have been a hippie, and if this were 1999, her character would have been played by Sandra Bullock and the film would have been called Forces Of Nature. Stiles plays her stock character as a goofy kid, and while the actress is typically winning, her ability to choose films that turn out better than they look fails her here. The rest of the cast—from Blair through supporting players Julie Hagerty and Larry Miller—is too good for the material, too, although Lee might have done more to make his character likable. "Guys like you are hard to find," Stiles tells him at one point. She can only mean weak-willed, infidelity-prone men, as Lee does little else to define his character. Perhaps he took a look at the script (after it passed through the gauntlet of four credited screenwriters), saw all the jokes about diarrhea, pubic lice, drunk old ladies, and drugged gravy, and thought, "Why bother?" Looking at the final results, it's hard to feel any other way.