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Verdict: Lame that tune.

Details: Starring Craig Bierko and Donal Lardner Ward. Rated R for language and some sexuality. 1 hour, 21 minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: A bland project that can't decide whether it's a music-biz satire or a midlife-crisis comedy-drama, "The Suburbans" concerns a one-hit-wonder teenage band from 1981 (named the Suburbans) that gets rediscovered by a music industry executive, played by Jennifer Love Hewitt, who wants to market their retro-music to the "post-boomer, pre-millennial demographic."

Actor Craig Bierko ("The Thirteenth Floor") plays a leather-jeaned band member whose girl-crazy antics give the movie some kick. But the script focuses on Danny (Donal Lardner Ward), whose fears of commitment to girlfriend Grace (Amy Brenneman, far too good for the movie) take up much screen time. There's a reason Danny's the focus: Ward is the movie's co-writer and director, and he also wrote the tinny little song that supposedly launched the Suburbans to fame.

In other words, blame him.

The movie's idea of humor is to put the guys on a Kenny G tour bus, have a toddler take a tinkle on an adult, or make the band members walk around with enormous wigs. It's a spoof without bite. The sole bit of interest comes from Jerry and Ben Stiller as father-and-son record executives whose hyper-hipster spiel is as scary as it is funny. Like the look-alike cul de sacs of the neighborhood that gives the band its name, this flick is generic, repetitive and boring.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service

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