Envy

(Herald rating * *)

Ben Stiller, Jack Black and humour so lowbrow that it's positively faecal: solid gold box-office success, right? Wrong. So wrong that the movie company left this in the can for two years, then released it to the big screens as a kind of follow-up to Black's School of Rock. Wrong again: it tanked and continues its downward drift to a cheap DVD.

Black's character is Nick Vanderpark, married to Natalie (Amy Poehler), whose best friend, Tim Dingman (Stiller), married to Debbie (Rachel Weisz), lives across the street. They commute together to their jobs in the sandpaper factory until Vanderpark invents Vapoorize, a product that — to put it in the most genteel way — makes doggy-do into doggy-didn't. Vanderpark offers Dingman a 50 per cent share but Dingman turns it down because he doesn't believe the idea will work.

Vanderpark becomes really, really extremely rich but doesn't want to leave the'hood. He builds a palace across the street from Dingman. Every time Dingman looks at Vanderpark's house he sees another symbol of the fortune he turned down.

Soon he's being eaten up by envy. Soon he's in the bars, which is a good plot development because that's where he meets a strange urban individual known as the J-Man, which is good because it lets Christopher Walken take over the movie for a while.

Mildly funny early on, too earnest and too loose later on, with a dialled-in performance from Stiller and a reigned-in one from Black. The DVD feels like a cheap afterthought with little bonus material apart from the publicity handouts.

DVD, video rental out now