OxfordPress.com

Grade: B-

Verdict: "Seinfeld" did abstinence more cleverly, but this movie's all-out raunch is impressive.

Details: Starring Josh Hartnett and Shannyn Sossamon. Directed by Michael Lehmann. Rated R for sex, nudity, and very raw language. 1 hour and 33 minutes.

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Review: With "40 Days and 40 Nights," we're looking at an entirely new form of date movie. Call it an arousal movie. That is, one that does all the preliminary sex-teasing for you with its endless barrage of bawdy sexual innuendo and shameless displays of sex-charged outrageousness. True, it's something of a one-joke picture, but that one joke is wonderfully Rabelaisian.

Josh Hartnett plays Matt, a twentysomething Web-site designer who can't get over the girlfriend who dumped him six months ago. Whenever he tries having sex with someone else, he sees a ceiling crack, followed by a black hole. Not exactly conducive to a good time.

While visiting his priest-in-training brother, he runs into the parish priest, who he learns is giving up little Madeleine cookies for Lent. Suddenly Matt's path is clear: he'll give up sex for Lent, the theory being that abstinence makes the heart grow less fond.

Giving up sex doesn't just mean the two-backed beast. It means no kissing, no licking, no fondling, and absolutely no self-gratification.

His roomie Ryan ("Road Trip's" Paulo Costanzo) doesn't buy it, but Matt vows to stay the course. Naturally, as soon as he gets his libido in check, he goes to the laundromat and meets the Girl. Her name is Erica (Shannyn Sossamon) and picking up someone while doing her dirty clothes is her thing. That must be why she brings her laundry but no detergent, no fabric softener and no change.

We're supposed to find Erica adorable. But Sossamon is as dauntingly charmless as she was in "A Knight's Tale." There's a smugness about her, a sense that she finds herself so irresistable that we must, too. So the romance comes off as desultory and forced. Instead of rooting for the couple, you wish that Matt would try doing laundry on another night and meet someone else.

Luckily, "40 Days" is more interested in raunch than romance. Along with the non-stop jokes about condoms, Viagra, erections, etc., there are some eye-popping visuals. Such as Matt's hallucination of a rippling ocean of breasts. Or when, in his sex-crazed daze, he thinks that the entire female work force of San Francisco has decided it's Don't-Wear-A-Top-To-Work Day.

Director Michael Lehmann has had a rough ride since the inspired claws-out comedy of "Heathers" ("Hudson Hawk" anyone?) Here, he revels in his movie's low-brow Little Annie Fanny humor. He loves its preening school-boy naughtinees and he makes us love it as well.

He even gets in a shrewd social observation or two. The female employees at Matt's dot-com company decide his vow is endangering their historical right of first refusal. "See, we have the power. That's part of the system," one explains. "By you taking that power you've [messed] with the system. And I think you can see why we can't let that happen."

That's probably the cleanest joke in the movie and it's delivered by someone in the tightest, skimpiest outfit you've ever seen. Make no mistake. "40 Days and 40 Nights" is a dumb sex comedy but it's a smart dumb sex comedy. It's risque, lewd, worthy of Balzac, 90-plus minutes of pretty hilarious smut.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, (none)